


Bad Timing

by apiphile



Category: Dr Who (Tenth Doctor, Series 3)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fix-It, Gen, Pseudoscience, post-Sound of Drums, space travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:32:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>written just post-Sound of Drums.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> written just post-Sound of Drums.

"Refuel, refuel, refuel," the Doctor hummed to himself as the TARDIS came to a rest on the chiselled granite flagstones. There were plenty of perfectly good places to refuel in the width of the multiverse, but the Doctor had grown quite enamoured of Cardiff.

He stepped out and locked the door behind him. Cardiff had (mostly) breathable air, (mostly) solid ground under his feet, no border controls or trigger-happy rebels (except on the weekends), and that nice little chip-shop. Perfect for refuelling both the TARDIS and the Doctor.

He ambled along to the chip shop at a lazy pace, wind attacking his hair. He missed the scarf, in weather like this – late afternoon on a Wednesday in November, the optimum time for buying greasy chips. The chipshop was deserted now, everyone either at home or at work, the students fast asleep (most of them in their beds, but a few had made it to their lectures before giving in). He was served quickly and grinned to himself when the woman behind the counter acquiesced to his request that she wrap his chips in paper instead of putting them in a polystyrene tray, "because it tastes better".

The Doctor proceeded to drown them in vinegar until the chipshop woman's eyebrows disappeared into her hairline and the shop smelt like an embalmer's workshop.

He wandered back to the TARDIS musing on the nature of chips as he stuffed each soggy handful into his mouth. Say what you liked about humanity – wax poetic about their indomitable spirit and their adaptability, lament their capacity for hatred and inventive cruelty – if you put the species into a Cancellation Tube you'd be left with the ability to do delicious things with root vegetables, and at present that was enough reason to like this little insular planet.

He'd just tossed the wrapper in a bin and wiped his fingers on his coat when he drew level with the familiar blue form of the TARDIS, and discovered another familiar form loitering outside it, his coat dancing in the wind and his hands in his trouser pockets.

"Captain," the Doctor acknowledged with a nod and an uneven grin. "Bored with responsibility already, are you?"

"Not at all," Jack said, his grin bigger and whiter. "Saw you were in the neighbourhood and thought I'd say hi. You didn't think you'd get away with parking on my headquarters and not saying _hi_, did you?"

"With you, it's never just _hi_," the Doctor said, leaning on the wall of the TARDIS and giving it a comforting pat. "What is it?"

Jack's grin vanished like mist. "The Time Agency are looking for you."

"_Here_?"

"Everywhere. And every_when_. They came to Torchwood thinking it was still the same operation it used to be before Canary Wharf …"

"And they recognised you?" The Doctor put is hands in his coat pockets thoughtfully. "They must have done. _Poster boy_."

Jack peered at the clouds with sudden interest. "I was elsewhere. They caught up with Owen instead." His frown deepened. "He couldn't tell them where you were, or where I was. So they roughed him up a bit. A lot."

The Doctor said mildly, "and _you_ used to work for them."

"They weren't like this."

"How do you know? You don't remember any of it. For all you know you were a regular Marquis de Sade fantasy." The Doctor's face creased up at the memory. "Met him, you know. Funny little man. Greasy hands. And didn't you say you used to be a torturer – "

Jack made a very unhappy face, and the Doctor checked his ramblings abruptly. Now was not the time for reminisces of strange Frenchmen. "Owen's still in hospital," Jack said, "Martha's filling in for him at the moment, but – "

"You asked Martha to work for _Torchwood_?" The Doctor asked, aghast.

"I didn't _ask_," Jack said patiently, backing away from him by one small but very telling step. "She volunteered."

"Because you told her you needed someone. And you _knew_ she'd come running to work with you, just like – " The Doctor snapped his fingers, "that."

"_She_ asked how things were and I said we were fine but short on medical staff who could deal with alien-inflicted injuries," Jack protested. "It's okay. She didn't even need any training with the new equipment. And she irritates people significantly less than her predecessor." He glanced back at the massive building behind them and lowered his voice, "A lot, lot less."

"But she's okay?" The Doctor asked, softening a little.

"Better than okay," Jack smiled. "Seeing some paediatrician –" he gave the Doctor a meaningful look that shot straight past him, "- back in London. Whenever she's not up to her elbows in Weevil she's on the phone to him. They're going to get into baby talk any day now. _Then_ Tosh'll start wanting Owen to come back." He chuckled vaguely at the air between them, his mind apparently elsewhere. "If there's one thing Owen doesn't do, it's baby talk."

"That's it?"

"What's it?"

"Small talk and a small warning?" The Doctor put his hands back in his pockets again. "You didn't come up here just to warn me about the Time Agency."

"I thought you might want to know."

"Mm hmm," the Doctor said, pushing on the TARDIS door. It was unlocked, and the door swung open, revealing a rucksack sitting in an unassuming heap on the grating. "It is _never_ just 'hi' with you, is it?" he repeated, cocking an eyebrow at Jack.

Jack flushed unexpectedly, and the Doctor regarded it with interest. Jack's blushes were not a common phenomenon. "You told Martha – and you told Rose – you said you could put them right back at the moment they left. The exact moment." He nodded at the TARDIS. "Can you? Really?"

"More or less," the Doctor smiled at him. "Changed your mind, have you?"

"Not exactly," Jack said. He held the Doctor's gaze, but his feet just about danced a fandango of awkwardness and embarrassment. Very unJack indeed. "They still need me."

"But …" the Doctor prompted.

"But _I_ need _you_."

The Doctor pushed the door open fully and gestured inside.

"Right back to the moment I left?" Jack asked, teetering on the brink. He looked an awful lot like he would find a way to justify it anyway if the Doctor said no at this point. He looked an awful lot like he'd trample dying children to get inside the TARDIS now. Knowing Jack, the Doctor thought, he probably _would_.

So he did not say 'no'. He said, "more or less, yeah," in a slightly guilty voice, and scratched his neck. Jack, as predicted, ignored the implication and practically bounced into the TARDIS. By the time the Doctor had pushed the door shut, kicked Jack's modest bag out of the way and reached the Hub, Jack had already run around the centre of the TARDIS once, and was knelt down by the Hub with his face against the panels and an expression of almost obscene joy on.

"It's good to be back," he said, and the Doctor was not sure if he was talking to _him_ or to the TARDIS.

"Please don't break my TARDIS this time," he warned, pulling a cable pretty much completely at random.

Jack looked wounded, one hand stretched over the top of the Hub and toying idly with something. "I didn't break her _last_ time," he protested. "Did I, baby?" he stroked the Hub beside his face. "Your silly Time Lord prejudices screwed with her navigation. She got confused."

"Jack."

"Yes?" Jack looked up through unfocussed eyes.

"Stop _caressing_ my TARDIS," the Doctor said, hitting another switch. The old girl seemed content enough to have Jack on board this time – indeed, she was lighting up like a Christmas tree – but he felt that actively molesting the TARDIS might be pushing Jack's luck somewhat.

"You _lick_ her," Jack said sulkily, standing up again.

"She's _my_ TARDIS," the Doctor pointed out, pulling a lever.

"I have more of her in me than you do," Jack said. He sounded smug.

"…the same can be said of many things, Jack."

Jack laughed delightedly and, much to the Doctor's relief, stopped stroking the control panels like a drug addict with a fluffy blanket. "I guess …" he said, and stopped, licking his lips. "She's your TARDIS. But I'm _her_ immortal human."

"So you're my undying nuisance-by-proxy?"

"I guess so," Jack grinned to himself, and the Doctor flipped the final switch.

"There we go," he said at the TARDIS purred into life with a kind of exaggerated satisfaction.

"Where are we going?"

"Oh, just some backwater little place. I think it's called the Boeshane Peninsula or something," the Doctor said, his eyes gleaming. "Late 51st Century, in fact. Founding of the Time Agency."

"That's where I grew up!"

"I _know_." The Doctor grinned. "I might want to see exactly what it is I'm up against."

"What it began as isn't really how it ended up," Jack warned him.

"Still." The Doctor said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them briskly. The TARDIS stopped, dropped, and after an unpleasant squelch noise, began to sink.

"Squelch?" Jack asked incredulously. "I don't remember the Boeshane Peninsula being _squelchy_."

The TARDIS stopped sinking, hitting something with a clang.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?"

The Doctor picked up a smallish red and grey instrument with a flat screen in the front and examined it. "Absolutely. Boeshane Peninsula, fifty ninety-eight." He whipped his glasses out of his pocket and examined it more closely. "Seems to be working."

"What is that?" Jack asked, striding over with his hands out. A bad habit, the Doctor thought, that the Captain really needed to learn how to break.

"It's a Universal Time and Space Positioning System."

Jack peered over his shoulder at the screen. "It's an Etch-a-Sketch."

"It's a Universal Time and Space Positioning System _made from_ an Etch-a-Sketch," the Doctor said patiently. "It's really very simple. The stuff inside these things is quite conductive once you've – look," he said, catching Jack's look, a thing bred of exasperation and amazement. "I know I could have just bought one from, oh, _anywhere_ in the forty-fifties, but I can't stand the little voice on the shop-bought ones, it's so patronising. 'You are standing fifteen feet away from a bottomless chasm'," he said in a snotty voice. "Yes, thank you, _I know_."

"So we're definitely on the Boeshane Peninsula, fifty ninety-eight?" Jack concluded, reaching out to touch the UTSPS.

"Yes!" The Doctor snatched it out of his reach.

Jack strode across to the door and flung it open. About a foot of foul-smelling mud slithered into the TARDIS in a miniature landslide, and when it had finished spreading over the floor like an oil slick they were faced with a very steep and squishy slope that came up to Jack's head, topped by a grim orange light.

"This doesn't look like it to me," he said, and the Doctor waved the UTSPS at him irritably. "Alright, alright."

After some shoving and wriggling and Jack making a fool of himself they made it to the top of the mound of what smelt a lot like slurry. Jack straightened up, brushed his hands off on his coat, and peered around them. The Doctor joined him, sneaking another worried glance at the UTSPS-a-sketch.

"I don't think – " Jack began, but the Doctor shushed him.

They stood in what looked like a pit of manure, peppered here and there with the probable wreckage of several old and pitted interstellar vessels, the small ones designed for use by the most adventurous and skin-flint of explorers. The ceiling brushed Jack's hair as he stood atop the gently heaving "earth", illuminated from some unseen light source to a fetching shade of miserable orange, covered in black pipes. At the far end of the enormous room was a booth with a blueish light in the window, and – the Doctor squinted and pulled his glasses off – an escape ladder.

He glanced up at Jack. Jack shrugged.

"Look, it says here – " the Doctor said, pointing at the screen.

Jack shrugged again. "I could be wrong. I've been gone …" he started counting off years on his fingers, his lips moving. " …a long time. I might just never have been in this sector." He didn't look convinced.

They set out across the field, occasionally sinking up to the knees in the cabbagey, sewer-smelling matter, sometimes tramping across the tops of mostly-submerged crafts with an echoing clang-clang two-step.

The booth sat on a wide lip around the manure field, and Jack and the Doctor hauled themselves onto it with some relief. "I smell worse than a Glasgow nightclub toilet," Jack complained, trying vainly to get the stains off the sleeves of his great-coat.

"I didn't like to say anything," the Doctor said, huffing on the lenses of his glasses to no avail, "but … considerably worse."

"You two got tickets?" asked a bored voice behind them.

Jack sprang to his feet immediately, leaving the Doctor scramble up on his own, his hands already ferreting out the essential piece of paper.

"'Cos if you ain't got a ticket you ain't going up and you ain't coming back for your thingy neither," said the owner of the voice. She was several inches taller than Jack and carried the kind of big, exciting gun that Jack usually liked to run around with, if the Doctor remembered correctly. It had nubbins on nubbins and all sorts of slots for sights, although what use sights would be when her intended targets were directly in front of her and effectively immortal in their own ways was questionable.

"My friend has our tickets," Jack said smoothly as the Doctor continued patting his pockets awkwardly. It had to be in _one_ of them. It was just that there were rather a lot of them and some of them were now very, very muddy, and one of them led into a pocket dimension anyway. He was always losing things in there. "Miss - ?"

"'Orricks," the girl said. She was maybe seventeen and had a vicious-looking scar on each cheek. She was also simpering, the Doctor noted. Yet another victim of the unavoidable Captain Jack Magnetism; he thrust his hand into one of the more disgusting pockets but came up only with a pen that was made from bee larvae.

He'd thought it was a good idea _at the time_.

"Captain Jack Harkness," Jack said, taking the guard's hand lightly. She simpered again.

"Enough," the Doctor said sharply, flashing the psychic paper at the guard and springing up the first few rungs of the escape ladder like a terrier.

"It's been a pleasure," Jack said, giving the girl a grin and holding onto her fingers for a moment longer.

"STOP IT."

The ladder seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the darkness almost immediately and leaving them both groping for the rungs with their slippery, soiled hands (Jack missed the rungs and groped the Doctor's calves twice, and the Doctor suspected the second time was a little less accidental than the first).

"Do you ever actually _think_ about flirting with these people," the Doctor asked after five minutes of silent climbing, Jack panting and wheezing below him, "or is it just one of those reflexive things, like the Lapodestiens reverting to their juvenile form if their mating season is unsuccessful?"

"Don't know," Jack said shortly, his fingers brushing the back of the Doctor's slimy trainer, "never thought about it."

"That answers that," the Doctor said, pulling himself up three rungs in one go.

They climbed on through the darkness.

"I really don't think this is the Boeshane Peninsula," Jack said eventually. His voice sounded hollowed out, swallowed up by the cold air around them. There was no hint of echo, and the Doctor got the impression the room they were climbing through was unspeakably cavernous. "Not in the fifty-first century, anyway." He gulped at the thin air. "By the fifty-first century," Jack went on, apparently eager to give the Doctor a history lesson, "they'd finished detaching it from the bedrock and fitted the final boosters. The bedrock's not even this deep."

"I _know_."

"Something's gone wrong," Jack said, and in the darkness above their heads there was a faint vibration.

The Doctor picked up the pace, and soon they were pulling themselves out of a narrow hole, flopping out onto cold shingle among oily-leaved bushes under a livid night sky.

"We're in the wrong place," Jack said flatly.

"Now why would you say that?"

Jack pointed at the sky. "The Peninsula was kept in pace with the sun, under the dome," he said quietly, his voice distant with memories, "following the light from East to West every day, never letting night fall on us. The sky was white with cloud-cover and brighter than snow. Your eyes got strong staring up at that."

The Doctor squinted at the purple-and-black, faint stars glowing apathetically between ugly slate clouds. "So, we're not on the Boeshane Peninsula in the fifty-first century, then."

"No," Jack said, "I don't think so."

The Doctor pulled his UTSPS-a-Sketch out of his pocket again and stared at it forlornly. He tapped it once or twice, twiddled the knobs until he'd drawn a dog, and when the screen persisted in showing the wrong co-ordinates he drop-kicked it and bashed it a couple of times against a rock. The UTSPS-a-Sketch continued to display the wrong date and place.

Jack looked at him quizzically.

"Alright," the Doctor admitted with an easy shrug. "We're lost." He was about to make a point about being lost being merely a step on the path to being found, and how they always ended up where they needed to be even if it wasn't where they were heading, but he was interrupted by a low vibrating sound that swiftly resolved itself into something discomfortingly familiar.

"Listen," Jack whispered.

_DUM da-da-da-da. DUM da-da-da-da._


	3. Part 3

The Torchwood headquarters were relatively untouched.

Jack had known, or hoped, that they would be; he'd laboured over the plans for them for years, bribed various nefarious work gangs (who later "disappeared"), used techniques from halfway around the universe when building the place. Sometimes he'd had to resort to hitting things with sticks. The point was that it was meant to be an impenetrable fortress.

But the offices were in disarray – Tosh's impressive collection of laptops was absent, the central screen smashed in a star-like fracture of thin glass, and Gwen's framed photo of Rhys (the one Jack could never decide whether it was sweet or hypocritical to display at work) was trampled and torn on the floor.

When he heard movement from the far side of the room his hand flew to where his gun wasn't and he swore.

Martha – thinner, her face smudged a little with soot – stared at him, the perfect picture of disbelief. "_Jack_?"

"Martha – " he didn't' get much further than that – she was across the room in seconds, hugging him fiercely. It was something of a shock for Jack; Martha hadn't exactly been the most demonstrative or affectionate of colleagues.

"Where the _hell_ have you been?" she asked, stepping back and surreptitiously wiping a tear from her face with the back of her hand. It left a streak of what looked like motor oil.

"Martha, what _happened_ here?"

"We tried, Jack, we _tried_ to make them stop."

"Stop who? Where is everyone?"

Martha shook her head, her throat working. After a moment she said in a shaky voice, "Ianto's trying to get some sleep."

"And the others?"

Martha shook her head again, her mouth twisting into a flat line, like the green silent stripe through the centre of an ECG screen. "Gone."

"_Dead_?" Jack put a hand out to steady himself and found only air. This was what happened when he went away, then; people died. He should have guessed.

"_Gone_," Martha corrected. "They went with _them_ \- took half our research, most of the armoury …"

"Went with _who_?" Jack barked. "Martha, what _happened_?"

"Where the hell have _you_ been?" Ianto asked, appearing in the doorway to the autopsy room. Jack thought it might have been the first time he'd ever seen him not wearing even _part_ of a suit; he was dressed in pyjama bottoms that were streaked with an alarming amount of blood, and bandages taped to various parts of his torso and arms, so many that he looked like he'd been running through a blizzard of medical supplies.

"What. Happened." Jack snapped, trying to maintain his cool.

"There were only three of them," Ianto said dully, rubbing at his heels. "Only three." He stared at his fingers as though he couldn't see them properly. "A lot of people are dead, sir."

"Most of Cardiff," Martha clarified, looking like it should be the most obvious thing in the world to assume that. Something cold gave a lurch in Jack's stomach. "The rest of them joined …them. You know."

"I DON'T FUCKING KNOW. _WHO_?"

But Martha just shook her head sadly. "Jack, where have you _been_?"

"Away," Jack said in a very exasperated voice. "Look. You have that phone. Didn't you call the Doctor?"

Martha's expression was a terrible thing. She looked as though someone had punched her repeatedly in the soul, about a week ago, and she was replaying it in her mind. "He didn't come."

"But – "

"Jack." She looked at him levelly. "He _didn't come_."

"We were just about to have a try at this … this thing one last time," Ianto said, not budging from the doorway and not looking at Jack. "Before you showed up, I mean. Before she _left_, Tosh and I were working on … anyway."

"Working on?" Jack passed a hand in front of his face and reminded himself that it would do no good to lose his temper now. Later, maybe, when there was no one to hear him shouting _FOR FUCK'S SAKE_ until his throat ruptured. "Stop talking in riddles, the pair of you. What happened? Who are _they_? What last attempt?"

"We were going to bring back Suzy," Ianto said, swaying gently. "I could have done it, sir. Tosh and I rebuilt the, the, you know. The Mitten. She's still in the morgue, and we didn't know who else to ask – "

"You _saw_ what happened to Gwen."

Ianto shrugged and gave Jack a surprisingly bitter look. He had a half-healed burn on his forehead, red and orange and angry and shaped like a distorted kiss. "We had no other choice. And Gwen's _gone_. She might have liked that. She might have helped us." He looked away again. "And _you weren't here_."

Jack sighed. "Who was going to – ?"

"I was," Ianto said, glaring briefly at Martha. "We talked about it. If it went wrong, that would be the lesser loss."

"No it _wouldn't_," Martha snapped. Jack got the feeling they'd had this argument a lot before.

"Okay," he said, looking around at the devastation (even this far underground he could still smell the smoke). At Martha's grim determination tempered with some sort of crystallised sea of tears she was probably never going to let out, a small weakness that just emphasised her strength. At Ianto, pale and bloody and unblinking as a lizard in the doorway to the autopsy room, who-knew-what flitting beneath the surface of his eyes. "Okay. We'll wake her. _I'll_ wake her," Jack said, picking his way through the wreckage. "We need all the help we can get, and I think. With Gwen gone I might be able to manage her. But you have to fill me in - _clearly_ \- on what happened."

Ianto pointed to an untouched filing cabinet with "tea kitty receipts" written on it, and winced, grabbing at his shoulder. "The Risen Mitten is in there, in the bottom drawer."

"I told you to leave you _bloody_ arm in a sling," Martha hissed through her teeth. "About three months ago," she added in a louder voice as Jack crouched by the cabinet, "these three people – two men and a woman – came into Cardiff. We didn't really notice at first, it was really hard to … see them, I suppose. They just kind of slid out from under your eye. I still can't – I still can't think what they _looked_ like."

Jack rattled the filing cabinet draw. It was locked. "An S.E.P field," he suggested.

"A what?"

"Years and years ago I met a man who travelled through possibilities, possible worlds, the way the Doctor travels through time," Jack said, getting a hairpin out of his pocket and bending it. "He told me about this thing, called a Somebody Else's Problem Field. Like – " he opened the drawer, which shot open so fast it nearly knocked him off-balance. " – like that thing with the Archangel network, only much less complicated. All it takes is some pink paint and a cup of tea."

"Pink paint and a cup of tea," Martha echoed incredulously.

"Yuh-huh. Ideas like that seep through realities sometimes, apparently. It's a lot, lot harder for sentient beings to travel that way, though. You need an anomalous object."

"A what?"

"When I met him he was travelling on a Chesterfield sofa," Jack said, arching his eyebrows. "Quite a man." He held up the new Risen Mitten. It was heavy and cumbersome and looked like pieces of it had been salvaged from any number of other projects. Hardly surprising that Ianto had been hiding something like this, perhaps, but Tosh? He'd thought better of her. "Right," he said, sliding the Risen Mitten on and feeling it catch on his knuckles, tearing the skin. "Let's go and get Suzy up." He gave Ianto an embarrassed look. "Again."

* * *

Half a universe away the Doctor checked his co-ordinates again and felt a brief flash of guilt for enjoying the chase so much. Martha would probably not approve. Rose would've, of course – she'd have loved every minute as much as he did, treating it as the wild ride it really was – the Doctor stamped on that thought wearily and instead contemplated The Next Step.

_What to do with the Master once he had him?_

The Doctor knew something fundamental about himself had changed, somewhere. He used to be so _kind_, and now he was impatient with everything. His punishments were more final now, more vicious – everything was darker, like a shadow had passed into him a couple of regenerations ago and dimmed the lights of the universe wherever he stepped.

And he knew what _Jack_ would do with the Master, of course – Jack would shoot him. Jack would keep on killing him until there was nothing left to kill, nothing left to revive, and he would watch every atom of the remains like a hawk, because Jack was a man intimately acquainted with the mutability and reversibility of death. Because Jack couldn't stand the idea of this _evil creature_ being allowed the chance to hurt anyone else, ever again.

_It's not that simple,_ the Doctor thought. Even though it probably was.

The TARDIS finally got a decent lock on the Vortex Manipulator's whereabouts, and there was a disturbing judder as it rematerialised.

The Doctor opened the TARDIS door cautiously and stared out at the slate grey sky, the slate grey water, and the crunchy, scrubby ground underfoot.

A gravel pit.

There was a certain ubiquity to his travels, the Doctor mused as he locked the TARDIS door and patted the sonic screwdriver in his pocket, assuring himself it was still there. Travel all across the universe and you'd find toxic tropical jungles, gaseous seas, frozen wastelands, majestic grasslands glowing black and iridescent as they waved in hurricane-force winds, the unspeakable beauty of flying cities and the calm splendour of subterranean villages, rare jewelled beaches and sandy heights that went on forever … but what one was most likely to encounter was this:

Monochromatic emptiness speckled with grey-green foliage and an uninviting pit of water.

The Doctor had stood in, battled in, planned in and pontificated in more gravel pits than any other being in the universe, so in a way perhaps it was fitting that he'd catch up with the Master here.

The Vortex Manipulator wasn't far off. Unless something had gone seriously awry, he'd encounter the Master soon. Lock horns, metaphorically speaking. Drag him back to the TARDIS and shove him into the room he'd prepared for the purpose.

Spend the next few millennia trying to get it through the Master's pig-headed … his otherwise excellent intellect … through his bloody-minded mind … trying to get through to him: it's _just us_. There's no need to fight anymore. We can co-exist.

Might as well hit him with the honest truth, when the Master was in no position to use it against him: _I'm tired, Master. And I'm lonely. Even keeping you in a cage, even a lifetime of insults, taunts and lies from behind that force-field is preferable to knowing you're not out there. To knowing there's no one out there but me and my memories._

He picked up his pace, scrambling over loose scree like a mountain goat, hardly noticing the rhythm of his footfalls as it grew more regular –

_DUM da-da-da-da._

* * *

" – and after that the city just kept burning," Martha concluded, as Jack pulled the gurney around to face the doorway. Suzy's body was grey and looked more like a waxwork than a person, a waxwork unaccountably peppered with blackened holes where each bullet had hit.

"Ready," Jack said, then, "wait. Are there _any_ guns left? At all?"

Ianto gave him a searching look. "Your old service revolver's in the filing cabinet."

Jack's relief showed on his face, he knew. "I'm going to need you to point that at her while I'm doing this."

Ianto scowled. "You can't just shoot her – " he broke off and sighed. "You can't just shoot her _again_."

"I don't want to," Jack assured him, "but if she doesn't co-operate then I'm going to have to. After all that's happened, we can't run the risk of having Suzy on the loose, not when she's drawing her energy from _me_."

"If she's drawing it from you," Martha pointed out, arranging Suzy's feet, "are we going to be able to kill her at all?"

"… I don't know." Jack tapped a scalpel blade thoughtfully against his lips, only realising he was doing it when Martha winced and made put-that-down gestures at him. "I don't know at all. Ianto, can you get the revolver, please?" He looked down at Suzy's breathless body. There was a whispered exchange taking place just outside the door –

"The problem with waking her up," Ianto was saying in a not _sotto_ enough _voce_, "is that Suzy's a bit … well …a bit mental."

"She has an inferiority complex, that's all," Jack called, but the conversation carried on regardless. He suspected they were ignoring him.

"Bloody clever though," Ianto admitted, and he reappeared in the doorway _sans_ revolver. When Jack looked at him expectantly he cleared his throat and said, "Martha's getting it. I can't walk that far."

"She's not _mental_," Jack said rather defensively, holding the Risen Mitten a safe distance from Suzy's head, "she's just … she's … she …" he gave up. "Alright, she might be a bit insane. Most of us are." While Ianto looked at him incredulously – apparently happy to gloss over the whole 'keeping a cyber-woman in the cellar and nearly getting them all killed' incident – Jack concentrated on Suzy Costello.

Suzy showed up silent and soaked by the Cardiff summer. She didn't really make friends with anyone at first, which pained Jack as he'd been desperately hoping she and Tosh could draw each other out a little and maybe _stop Owen talking for five minutes_, but she'd worked around the clock. Literally. Hadn't slept for three days and then passed out under her desk, so desperate to prove herself.

And of course she'd slept with Owen, because everyone slept with Owen (Jack had been forced to have a Little Talk with him about contraception and caution after he'd had to spend a weekend dousing his pubes with the lavender-scented crap that passed for treatment for crabs in the early 21st century; Owen had called him a fucking hypocrite and Jack had said "who gave _who_ crabs, Owen?" and Suzy had interrupted, "whom" and Owen stormed out), and Jack had been disappointed and said so, and maybe he shouldn't have said so. It was insane to start holding her up to the same expectations she held herself up to.

"Jack," Martha said, holding the revolver away from her like it was a dead fish. Jack gave a start – too lost in his own thoughts to hear her come in – and nodded. Martha said, "I'm not shooting anyone."

"Give it to Ianto, then."

Martha wavered. "Ianto can't shoot straight."

"I can shoot just fine when you're not pulling on my arm," Ianto muttered, reaching for the revolver.

"Enough arguing. One of you is going to hold the gun and point it at Suzy's head, and one of you is going to hold her feet so she doesn't try to run for it straight away," Jack instructed. "I don't care which one does which, but you need to hurry up." He closed his eyes and pressed the palm of the Risen Mitten - _never, ever let Ianto name anything ever again_, he reminded himself – to the back of Suzy's head, feeling even through the layers of metal the fragments of her shattered skull give way beneath his gentle touch.

"Ready," he said quietly, leaning down until his forehead was almost touching Suzy's.

"Compassionate thoughts," Ianto urged him quietly, "remember."

"_I'm_ not the one who thinks she's mental," Jack said crossly.

"Yeah," Ianto said under his breath, "and _I'm_ not the one who shot her."

"I heard that." Jack's fingers tightened reflexively and there – there – he felt it, like his spine snapping back into place after a particularly bad break, like the gentle tug of blood flowing backwards in his veins – something had connected. He kept his eyes shut, leaning back, feeling threads prickling on the back of his lips and knowing if he looked he'd see nothing – no golden chords, no shower of light, just Suzy Costello's flesh piecing itself back together.

There was a faint, second heartbeat underlying his own, like an echo in his head. It changed the rhythm of the _baddump, baddump_ to something else. _Think compassionate thoughts,_ he reminded himself, and with his free hand he stroked Suzy's hair back from her face.

_I forgive you,_ he thought, and in his head it sounded like the Doctor. Perhaps it was the worst thing he could have thought, but once it was there it rattled around his brain like a loose pea. _I forgive you._

He opened his eyes.

Suzy's eyes flew open and she sucked in a first gasp of air with an agonised sound – Jack felt a flash of sympathy then. It was painful, that first breath, more painful than anyone but he or Suzy could know. The warmth of life pushing back the cold black again, battling for every inch of body and soul hurt like putting frostbitten feet in boiling water, like trying to withdraw shards of glass from the eye, like pushing your guts methodically back into your body, each brush of clothing against the lips of the wound like a fresh stab.

He removed the Mitten.

Suzy choked, coughed, and dribbled black goo from her lips. Jack wiped it away with his sleeve, and pinned her arms to the table.

"Welcome back."

"_You_," Suzy said, her voice low and her face twisted in pain. She didn't seem terribly happy to see him.

"Me," Jack agreed, as she tried to get up. "You've been dead a while this time, Suzy. You need to take it easy for a bit."

"LET ME GO." Suzy drooled more black ooze, coughed, and narrowly missed spraying Jack's face with it. It dribbled down over her cheek, turning wine, burgundy, crimson, scarlet, bright oxygenated red.

"No can do, Suzy. Not yet."

Suzy gave him a baleful look that might have melted the skin clean off his skull if he'd been a normal man. "What do you _want_?"

"Nothing but the pleasure of your company, Suzy."

"Stop saying my fucking name." At least she wasn't struggling anymore, just looking up at Jack with the kind of stare that would make a basilisk quail. "You wouldn't have brought me _back_ unless you wanted something. Well, I'm not telling you _anything_. You replaced me."

"I sort of had to, Suzy. You were dead." Jack tried to smile at her, but the ferocity of her gaze was beginning to put him off. "You know what's been happening?"

"I know my _replacement_ isn't dead yet," she said sourly. "Half of the fucking city but not _her_, she gets away alive while I'm out there in the cold … and the darkness … the darkness …"

"She betrayed us, Suzy," Ianto said abruptly. Jack glanced back over his shoulder, ready to tell him to shut up, but when he looked back at Suzy she was smiling the smile of the recently vindicated.

"What do you need me to do?" she whispered.

"Torchwood's … well, it's …" Jack looked back at Martha for guidance, but Martha just shrugged and kept her fingers closed around Suzy's ankles like a vice. The word _decimated_ sprang to mind, even though it wasn't accurate and even if it _had_ been, wouldn't have been the word he'd use. "We need your help," he said eventually.

Suzy smiled at him. "I can't do much if you won't let me up."

Jack and Martha exchanged a glance, and Martha shrugged, flexing her fingers. They both looked to Ianto, still holding the revolver steady. Jack nodded.

"Coffee?" he asked, releasing Suzy.

"Tea," Suzy corrected, sitting up stiffly. She massaged her arms where Jack had been holding them, touched the bullet holes in her clothing with a look of mild regret, and finally spotted Martha, standing silent and still at the end of the gurney. Suzy's expression solidified into something quite nasty. "Another _replacement_?"

"Yes," Martha said before Jack could answer, "but I'm Owen's, not yours."

"Owen," Suzy sighed, looking just a little triumphant. "He turned on you too?"

"So did Tosh," Martha said, holding Suzy's gorgon stare admirably. "They all went without a word to the rest of us. Just left like they …like they were sleep-walking."

Suzy regarded Martha a touch more softly than she had Jack. _Please let them get on,_ Jack thought desperately. _Please don't let them fight._ "Like they were under some sort of hypnosis?"

"No, it was more like … like puppetry," Martha frowned, trying to call the picture to mind, apparently. "But … by the time they left, it was like they weren't really there, like they'd … this S.E.P. thing Jack was talking about, like they'd been …absorbed into it."

"A Somebody Else's Problem Field?" Suzy asked, looking surprised as she swung herself into a more dignified sitting position. Jack watched the back of her head putting itself together like a jigsaw puzzle, a sight that would have reduced anyone else to grinding nausea. "But they're … solely theoretical so far. I've _seen_ the work on them – I _saw_ the work on them before the Captain … before I … well."

"Before you went on a killing spree and shot yourself in the jaw," Jack said, ready to grab her if she made a break for it. He noticed Ianto still hadn't lowered the gun. "Don't think anyone's forgotten that, Suzy. We haven't."

Martha, to her credit, didn't recoil. Jack supposed that after all his anecdotes about torturing PoWs she wasn't as easily perturbed as she'd once been. Instead, she stuck out her hand and said, "Martha Jones."

"You know who I am, I suppose," Suzy said bitterly. "Do they even mention me at all?"

"Yes," Martha said, taking Suzy's unresisting hand, "but I don't think I got both sides of the story."

Jack raised an eyebrow behind Suzy's head. Tenderness and tact were not Martha's forte at all; he'd clearly missed a lot while he was away. He watched the final pieces of Suzy's skull slot themselves into place as her scalp folded neatly back flat again, and thought _maybe I missed a lot while I was here, too_.

"I need answers first," Suzy said, her fingers closing briefly around Martha's wrist. _That_ unsettled her, Jack could see – the way her pupils dilated briefly and her jaw loosened. "I need a lot of answers."

Suzy turned back to look up at Jack, her hand sliding back onto her lap, and she gave him the reptilian stare again, only a lightening of her expression indicating that she wasn't about to try and tear his lungs out or something. "And the first thing I need to know is," she said, watching Jack's face for a reaction, "why can I hear drums?"

Jack listened to the double heart-beat in his ears, the heartbeat that was evenly-matched now, and recognised with a sick lurch in his chest why he knew that combined sound –

_DUM da-da-da-da. DUM-da-da-da-da._


	4. Part 4

The Doctor began to hum as he picked his way over the loose rocks, occasionally waving his arms to keep his precarious balance on the wobbly landscape.

So far he hadn't seen anything that might reasonably be a disguised lair. Of course, as soon as the Master realized there was a time craft in the area he'd head towards it like a homing pigeon, drawn there like an iron filing to a magnet, the way anyone with enough damn artron energy riddled through their being was –

The Doctor turned on his heel, nearly fell over, and bolted back to the TARDIS with all the grace and dignity of a newborn giraffe. He tried to remember if he'd left any lock-picking tools in the pocket of the dressing-gown the Master had taken. Lock-picking tools had a habit of ending up all over the place, particularly since Jack had been on board and they'd had the little talk about not shooting open doors.

Not that it mattered – if the Master had stopped off _anywhere_ with a rudimentary civilisation he could have taken some, and a Yale lock was after all not the most complicated thing in the universe to thwart.

As he drew level with the TARDIS the Doctor caught his breath, and looked at the door. It was shut flush with the frame.

He pressed his hand to the wooden panels and gave an experimental push. Locked still.

Relief coursed through him like cheap booze, and he fitted the key to the TARDIS's lock with considerably lighter hearts. It was much wiser to wait for the Master to come to him than to run off and chase him all over the place like some kind of intergalactic bloodhound.

The Doctor pushed the TARDIS door open and stepped inside.

Something heavy and hard connected with the back of his head just where it met his neck.

There was a flash of blue light behind his eyes as his brain rattled against the inside of his skull and then … nothing but whiteness.

* * *

"Thanks to the S.E.P, we essentially have _no idea_ who or what these people are," Jack began. Normally he'd have felt perfectly at ease striding up and down while he talking, or leaning on one of the desks in a borderline indecent fashion (because if you couldn't combine sex appeal with military briefings, what was the point?), but Suzy's stare and the shambles the HQ had been reduced to were starting to get on his nerves.

He tried to console himself that at least _Suzy_ was looking at him, which Ianto was still refusing to do and which seemed to be causing Martha an undue amount of distress. It didn't help. "All we know is that there are three of them – one female, two male – and that they can exert some sort of hypnotic power in addition to generating a form of distraction field which is supposed to be impossible in this reality. And that they're _highly_ dangerous," Jack caught Suzy's hot-coal stare briefly, "I was kind of hoping …"

"That I'd know something?" Suzy sneered. "It's amazing the things you learn from staying dead for longer than a few seconds at a time, isn't it, _sir_?" She sipped at what was getting on for her eighth cup of tea, possibly her ninth. "They're not from here. Very much not from here. That much … seeped through."

"Not from here as in this planet or this reality or this time?" Jack asked impatiently. You'd think someone who spent so much outside of the usual constrictions of the standard four dimensions would know how to be more specific about which she was discussing.

Suzy took another sip of her tea with maddening slowness and regarded him like a scientific specimen. "All three, as far as I could tell."

"That's not possible," Jack said flatly.

"Said the man who couldn't die to the woman he raised from the dead," Suzy reminded him with surprising delicacy. It was a _catlike_ delicacy, with the suggestion of malice to come in it, and Jack gave her a cautious once-over. It was easy to forget, when faced with her obvious fragility and her terrible sense of inadequacy, that Suzy Costello was capable of cutting cruelty.

For _now_ she seemed safe enough, her cup of tea drawing colour back into her cheeks, but Jack felt much more comfortable now his service revolver was back in its holster. Whatever Ianto claimed, he could no more shoot straight than he could play the dulcimer with his toes.

"Look," Suzy said, tapping her fingers on the side of her mug – and Jack knew the rhythm without listening, "I'm telling you what I know, and what I know is that they belong even less than you do. They … they seem like the same person, or the same mind."

"A hive mind."

Suzy's fingernails clinked out _DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_ like the warning rattle of an angered snake. "I suppose." She didn't seem certain, more like she was trying to hang onto the last slippery wisps of a waking dream, her eyes darting to the ceiling as she searched her mind.

Jack stole a glance at Ianto, who was watching Suzy like he might watch a wasp, a very dangerous wasp, and one at Martha, who had her hands in her jacket pockets and a look on her face that seemed part-way between infatuation and terror. Jack got the feeling that the pretty paediatrician might be out of the running for a little while. Shame. He was _nice_.

"We need to find out more about these … beings … before we can act," Jack muttered. "How the hell are we going to get around the S.E.P. field for long enough to gather intel?"

"Could we focus the – what's _left_ of the monitoring equipment on it?" Martha suggested. Jack noticed she was talking to Suzy and not to him.

"It's plausible," Suzy said, staring at Jack as though she could set him on fire with her mind. Jack wouldn't have put it past her. "In theory. Much like the field itself." She sipped her tea and frowned. "We'd need an anomalous object, though, to cancel out the effects of – "

"Fortunately," Jack said, cutting her off as he lunged for the filing cabinet again, "I just happen to have one of those _lying around_." He stuck his hand into the back of the drawer and after some rummaging and close brushes with substances he'd rather not think about he retrieved a narrow strip of thick reddish fabric. It looked – if one tried to focus directly on it – like it was lying at the bottom of a whirlpool, or under highly distorted glass. "You have to look at it out of the corner of your eye," he explained, as all three remaining members of Torchwood squinted painfully around the dangling shred.

"… what is it?" Ianto asked eventually.

"Sofa upholstery," Jack said with a smirk and some studied nonchalance, tucking it into his breast pocket. "Figured it might come in handy some day. If we can – and by 'we' I of course mean Suzy, this kind of engineering is _way_ over my head – if we can just find some way to set our monitoring equipment to the same frequency, it'll enter the same theoretically state as the S.E.P. field, hopefully allow us to observe inside it1. Suzy, do you think you can – "

"Do you keep trophies from _everyone_ you fuck?" Ianto muttered sourly as Jack tore past him, snatching up a few pieces of equipment like a human tornado hell bent on some very motherboard-heavy Armageddon.

"No," Jack said loudly enough for everyone to hear him. "Sometimes I just keep _them_ instead."

Ianto looked away and bent awkwardly, painfully, to retrieve a fragment of twisted metal from the debris. To the untrained eye it looked like contorted steel but Ianto presumably knew as well as Jack did that it was an extremely effective heat sink, a vital component to what they might actually manage to build. Jack had salvaged it from the wreckage of a Chula personnel craft, not that anyone _here_ knew.

"Here," Ianto dropped it on the top of the rapidly-growing pile in Jack's arms, keeping his gaze coolly averted. Jack counted the blood seeps on his dressings – there were fourteen on his right arm alone.

"What _happened_ to you?" Jack asked in a low voice as Suzy began calling for various tools, leaving Martha to rush around like an errand girl.

Ianto shrugged. "Owen, hypnotised. Flamethrower. Me – Martha." He made the appropriate gestures, sketching out a picture of a human shield clad in what Jack had always thought of as a cheap and nasty suit anyway.

Jack tried to find somewhere he could put a reassuring hand on Ianto without causing him excruciating pain, and failed. There was simply nowhere that wasn't marked besides the top of his head, and that would be patronising. He settled for catching his eye at last. "Don't be a self-sacrificing idiot, Ianto. We _need_ you."

"Do you?"

"_Yes_." Jack smiled a little, trying to find a crack in Ianto's glacial defences. "And anyway, it's _my_ job to be the self-sacrificing idiot around here."

"Not much of a sacrifice if you don't stay _dead_, is it?" Ianto said, and in a very quiet voice added, "And anyway, you weren't _here_."

Jack didn't bother to correct him. It wasn't for Ianto to know how it felt, the sudden ebb of blood back to the heart, the coldness creeping into his extremities before the jolt of life returning like a slap to every nerve ending at once. He carted his mound of equipment and fragments of tech over to where Suzy sat, and began sorting through them like a grandmother at a jumble sale instead.

"When did you start fucking _Ianto_?" Suzy asked under her breath. The "of all people" addendum went unsaid.

"Don't you know?" Jack muttered, pushing a small pile of potentially useful pieces in her direction. At least two of them weren't supposed to have been invented for several lifetimes yet, but he didn't think that mattered anymore.

"Not any longer," Suzy said, flexing her fingers around the base of something even Jack couldn't identify. "I'm alive now."

"No messages for me from the great beyond this time, then?"

"Try sticking your head in there sometime and find out," she said with the kind of sweetness that stripped paint and etched bone.

"No thanks. I've gone off the idea of dying." He passed her another strange and horrifying piece of partly-organic tech, one that curled back on itself like a ram's horn. Suzy took it without looking, her fingers finding the correct grooves by some kind of instinct - it must have been by instinct, they'd acquired the damn thing after he shot her the second time – and she lowered her voice so that it was barely a breath.

"_So have I_. Jack, you are not putting me back in that fucking drawer the minute I've served my purpose."

"That rather depends on how you behave, doesn't it?" Jack said from between his teeth. Suzy's hands moved like spiders, slotting, caressing, twisting. Something began to take shape beneath them like a sculpture beneath a chisel. "I will not hesitate to shoot you in the head again if you prove a threat to the rest of my team."

"Oh please," Suzy murmured, "like I can do anything to _Ianto_ that you haven't done already, and worse."

"Both of you, _shut up_," Martha snapped, peeling away from the wall she'd been leaning on and giving first Jack and then Suzy the stink-eye.

_That was brave,_ Jack thought, handing Suzy another component.

* * *

The Doctor didn't need to open his eyes to know where he was – the gentle hum and the smell of cordite told him what logic had already suggested. He'd put a lot of thought into the room, trying to make it as comfortable as possible (because was not a monster) while making sure that it was utterly inescapable even for one as slippery and shrewd as the Master, and in the end he thought he had succeeded.

"The trouble with inescapable prisons," the Master said, his voice clear as a bell through the thick field of static, "is that sooner or later there's the chance you'll end up trapped in one." He stroked the dome, sending sparks off from the palm of his hand. "Never build a prison you couldn't escape from yourself, Doctor. It's in the _Evil Overlord's Handguide_. See what you miss out on through this tedious adherence to morals?" the Master drew another shower of static out of the dome by prodding it with his finger and the Doctor winced and the crackling sound.

"Wasn't there anything in there about not gloating?" the Doctor croaked. The air in the dome smelt bad. It was perfectly breathable, he knew that, but it stank of sulphur and cordite and singed flesh and it wouldn't fade away.

The Master ignored his interruption and said almost dreamily, "But you're not really _that_ moral a creature, are you, Doctor? Two. Whole. Species." His face almost seemed to glow with the thought of it, delight spreading through his skin like fire. The Doctor noticed that he was still wearing that old silk dressing gown of his. "How did that _feel_, Doctor? Wiping out the two most _powerful_ races in the universe … in one … gesture?"

The Doctor politely shut out that part of his brain that remembered _exactly_ what that felt like, and said in a low, taunting voice, "how did it feel, Master, when you first saw the Cruciform? Before you _fled_? How afraid were you when you realised they – not us, but they – had built the ultimate weapon? Were you _terrified_, Master?"

The Master quivered from his head to his toes, and fixed the Doctor with an awful, crooked half-smile. "Yes," he said, and the queer little smile really was all the more revolting for being on such a handsome face, "I was afraid I would never get to use it." His expression hardened. "And instead it was _you_."

"Yes."

"_You_ used it," the Master said, circling the dome.

"Yes."

"_You_ used the ultimate weapon. _You_ destroyed two whole species, wiped them from time like they never were. _You_." The Master's hands clenched into two tight, painful fists. Blood flecked his lips, the corners of his wide mouth.

"Yes," said the Doctor evenly. "Because _you_ ran."

* * *

"Will it run?" Ianto asked rather sceptically. The higgledy-piggledy thing loomed like a bad dream off the HQ floor, a monitor screen or two (angled to reflect each other) and input tray with vicious-looking hooks in it sprouting from the melee like lucidity from delirium. It was either a work of genius or an act of lunacy, and with Suzy it was generally hard to tell which until _after_ things had been switched on.

"It draws energy from the rift," Suzy said, deliberately misconstruing him. "It will keep running longer than most of us will. Except Jack."

Jack slid the upholstery into the input tray and leapt back as the hooks seized it suddenly, scraping his fingers. "_Fuck_. You could have warned me it was going to do that."

Suzy gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence. "Where's the fun in _that_?" She slid her hand into a fist-shaped hole in the Giger-esque nightmare of wires and clicked her tongue impatiently. In the darkness around her forearm Jack thought he saw things moving, jointed things that might be either machine or arthropod.

The screens flared lazily into life, pouring up star charts faster and faster – Jack recognised most of them by long-ago instinct, except some of the more far-flung constellations and earlier galaxies (faded many millennia ago). He'd spent so long studying them at the Agency that they were pretty much imprinted into his brain, along with the 18 Articles of Conduct and the 12 Objectives.

When one held on the screen he inhaled - a short, wounded hiss. It was especially familiar. "Hey, that's –"

"They're from the Boeshane Peninsula," Suzy said. "Well. _A_ Boeshane Peninsula." She flexed her arm, thin muscles rippling, and something dark dribbled out of the machine below her hand. Suzy appeared not to notice.

Martha shot Jack a puzzled look laced with frantic comprehension. "Isn't that where _you're_ from?"

"Uh-huh," Jack said meditatively, pulling on his lower lip. He decided _not_ to mention that it was also the place he and the Doctor had tried to reach last. Mentioning that he'd seen the Doctor at all seemed like a route fraught with arguments that he didn't have time for. "Suzy, do you know _which_ variant of the Peninsula they're fom?" And _when_?"

"I can't tell you when without knowing which," Suzy said irritably, and, "fucking Tosh. This is _her_ department."

"Can you tell which Peninsula?" Jack repeated urgently.

"It's not registered," Suzy said frostily, and she looked back at Jack over her shoulder. She was sweating and Jack thought he saw a muscle in her face twitch. "Just comes up as 'authorised personnel only' –" she pointed at the screen with her free hand.

Jack swore under his breath as he saw the Time Agency logo flashing sporadically over the warning, so fast it was virtually subliminal.

"I can try and –" Suzy began.

"_Don't_," Jack warned. "You can't, and they'll know if you try. It's set up to locate and eliminate potential interlopers, and the last thing we need is the armed response team – why they call themselves that I'll never know, it's not like there's an unarmed response team … we don't want them here." He sighed to himself, and in the virtual silence that followed the splat of something like oil dribbling out of the machine was clearly audible. Jack frowned. He didn't think he'd seen Suzy putting anything liquid into its construction. "Can you at least get a fix on what our new friends actually _are_?"

Suzy's face was a brief but telling rictus of pain – bringing an anxious Martha running over to her side, Jack noted. She turned her head so that she was squinting at the screen side-own, like she was trying to peer around at an anomalous object contained within it. "It seems they're human. Altered human. Human out of time. I _think_. It won't stay – "

A fat spark spat out of the heap dangerously close to her face and something on the floor began to smoulder. Suzy gasped, a strange sound that ended in a strangled cry. Something like the bastard offspring of a centipede and a series of pistons moved in the depths of the machine.

"Get your hand _out_ of there!" Jack yelled, drawing his service revolver and pointing it into the heart of the monitoring stack.

In a somewhat unprecedented move Suzy actually did as she was told, whipping her hand away with some difficulty. Jack saw bloodied fingers arc past his face, but before he could even locate the insectoid presence, let alone fire at it, the monitoring stack collapsed and roared into flames.

Ianto passed him the fire-extinguisher without a word. A moment or two later the fire had burnt itself out with very little assistance on their part, leaving a puddle and no sign of the heat-sink, which was a little alarming as Jack had personally seen it survive trips in solar-surfing craft.

"Suzy?" Martha asked, clutching at her shoulder. "Suzy, are you okay?" Blood dripped from Suzy's fingers onto the floor, and dark streaks covered most of her arm; she looked faint and sick. Martha pressed her fingers to Suzy's wrist, searching for a pulse, and Suzy tried to bat her away.

"I will be fine once you find a way to stop the _fucking drums_," Suzy hissed, clutching at her head with her uninjured hand.

"Drums?" Martha whispered, looking at Jack.

Jack took a deep breath, feeling the drumbeat in his blood. "I have … some bad news."


	5. Chapter 5

"That's where you went?" Martha shouted, brandishing a tea-cup like a throwing star. "You just picked up your bag and said you'd been gone a minute and all the time the Doctor was _there_ and you didn't even mention it you _bastard_ \- "

"Been called that before," Jack muttered without conviction.

"Has anyone _not_ called you that?" Suzy said with what looked like the beginnings of a smile. Jack didn't have time to retort.

"How did you even know he was _here_?" Martha yelled. Jack was impressed. Normally Martha losing her temper was such an unimpressive thing that he'd figured it wasn't a source of worry for him at all; apparently he'd just never seen her wound up enough. "You said – "

Jack took a deep breath and pinched his nose. "Can we have a screaming domestic about this _after_ we've saved the world, please?"

"From the looks of things," Martha said sourly, "it's your fault we need to save the world this time anyway."

"When is it not?" Ianto muttered, and Jack restrained the urge to dive over the desk and slap him in the back of the head. He was having a very trying day and only the likelihood of any more injuries to Ianto probably finishing him off prevent him from going through with it. "Look," Ianto said, cutting through the animosity like a listor knife, "if this is to do with that – Master – person … thing … and your friend is out hunting for him, don't you think you should find some way to warn him?"

"He didn't answer before," Martha said somewhat sulkily.

"He will," Jack said.

"Oh, because _you're_ calling?" Martha snapped. "Fuck you."

Jack blinked wearily. "Just call him, will you?"

"Me?"

"Martha," Jack sighed. "It's _your_ phone."

* * *

"What's this?" The Master murmured as a tinny slightly distorted version of _I Will Surive_ began playing from under the hub of the TARDIS. He abandoned his pacing and began rummaging instead.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Nothing?" The Master located the source of the terrible music and waved the phone accusingly at the Doctor. "Nothing, tra-lalala? Nothing this tacky is a mere _nothing_, Doctor." He smiled at the phone. "Shall we see who's calling?" He glanced at the screen. "Oh, look! It's Per Number One! The one who was so misguidedly in love with you. Not to be confused with Pet Number Two, the indestructible freak who was _also_ in love with you – you _are_ popular, Doctor. How do you do it? Cologne?" The phone continued playing an appalling, jangly interpretation of Donna Summers' hit song, disco as rendered by a small speaker and a MIDI file. "Shall I answer it? I think I shall."

"Doctor?" Martha's voice echoed loud and clear around the TARDIS control room. "Doctor, listen to me, you have to be careful – "

"Hello, Martha Jones," the Master crooned, waving a hand at the Doctor as he scrabbled helplessly at the wall of the dome with a face like thunder.

"… you're not the Doctor."

"Remarkably astute of you. That might almost pass for sapience, among some lesser species." The Master smirked across the floor at his captive. "Did you have a message?"

"Give me that," Jack's voice sounded in the distance then – more clearly – said, "_Master_."

"Hello, my useful little indestructible vessel. Trying to warn the Doctor, are you? I'm afraid it might be a little too late for that to be of any use to him."

"What have you done to him? Where is he? If you've hurt him I swear I'll – "

"Dialogue straight from an action flick," The Master yawned, "compose yourself, Jack. Your precious Doctor is perfectly safe for the time being – he and I are having a cup of tea and a _chat_ about his past misdemeanours. His fraternising with lesser races, for one." The Master held the phone up to the dome. "Say hello, Doctor."

"HANG UP, YOU IDIOTS," The Doctor said hoarsely.

"That wasn't very friendly," The Master chided. "I do hope that wasn't some silly attempt to prevent me from tracking them, Doctor. I already know where they are – my puppets will see to them presently." He wandered over to the dome and poked it with a forefinger, sending sparks arcing inwards to connect with the Doctor's flesh. "Or the Time Agency will. Either way they're – " he inhaled, "- _doome_. I do love that word. So ominous. Such predictive finality. None of the subjunctive you seem to favour so much, about 'doomed'."

"The Time Agency work for you?" The Doctor muttered, getting to his feet again awkwardly.

"They _will_ have always worked for me, soon," the Master said idly. "In the meantime, you're going to tell me where to find the remaining Artefacts of Rassilon."

"No, I can't say that I am, really," the Doctor frowned. "And you lied to Jack about the tea."

"You've lied to him about far bigger realities, I'm sure. Now." The Master cracked his knuckles seeming aimlessly. "Before you _wiped out_ your own race, you were charged with hiding the Artefacts of Rassilon."

"Yup." The Doctor gave him a quizzical smile.

"And you succeeded."

"Yup."

"And now you're going to tell me where they are."

"Can't say I am." The Doctor rocked on his heels.

"I can have your little friends destroy themselves from the inside out if I like," the Master said in a surprisingly shaky voice. "That much is already within my power. So let's try that again." He stared at the Doctor with eyes like diamonds. "You hid the Artefacts."

"Yes."

"You hid them somewhere safe."

"Of course."

"You hid them somewhere unconnected with Gallifrey, obviously."

"Yes."

"Tell me where."

"No."

"Doctor, Doctor, Doctor," The Master said, pacing slowly around the dome, his hands in the dressing gown pockets. "The Artefacts of Rassilon are the cornerstone around which our civilisation was built."

"Yes."

"And our civilisation, thanks to someone sitting only the other side of this wall from me – " the Master poked the dome, and more vicious sparks flew into the Doctor, "- is dead."

"Yes."

"But Rassilon had powers beyond the very comprehension of mere Time Lords," the Master continued, picking an imaginary piece of fluff from the shoulder of his stolen garment. "Extraordinary powers over time, yes, but also over life and death, creation and destruction."

"Sorry, were you going somewhere with this? I think my foot's fallen asleep, and you know perfectly well I learned all this in the Academy."

"_I know what you fear, Doctor_," the Master hissed, bringing his face up close to the outer edge of the dome.

"Spiders with tentacle faces? I know, it's ridiculous," the Doctor sighed, "but fear is rarely rational. Also, those tentacles are effectively _another_ eight prey-hunting legs. Puts the wind up me a bit, that does."

The Master ignored his interruption. "_I know what keeps you awake at night, Doctor_."

"Nothing, since I got Jack and his impossible snoring out of my TARDIS. It's like someone chainsawing a steelworks, it really is. You wouldn't believe it if you haven't heard it. I'm surprised he doesn't wake himself up," The Doctor gave the Master another quizzical look. "I must say you're taking a very flattering concern over my sleep patterns."

"With the Artefacts of Rassilon we could rebuild Gallifrey," the Master whispered. "Reimage the race of the Time Lords under our command."

"_Your_ command, you mean."

"Do you really want to go on being all alone in the universe, Doctor? The last remnant of your race? The sole survivor? _All alone, forever_?" The Master smiled.

"I'm not alone," the Doctor said cheerfully, leaning back with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. "I have you, don't I?" He stretched. "Did I tell you how glad I am to see you alive and well, incidentally? I mean, I had rather hoped this little scene would be being played out with _you_ in here and not me, but that's such a small detail." He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. "Really, I'm just happy you're not dead."

"You're beginning to try my patience, Doctor."

The Doctor put _his_ face up very close to the edge of the dome and gave the Master one of his most disturbed smiles. "Only just now? I've been _trying_ for ages."

* * *

"_Fuck_," Jack said. He went on swearing for a little while longer1 while Martha gazed despondently at the phone.

"Now what?" Ianto asked. "It's too late to warn your friend."

"…it might not be," Jack said slowly, with mounting excitement. "It would involve breaking all the ethical codes of time travel apart from the one about not being your own grandfather, but we _might_ \- be able to – " he grabbed what looked like a metallic carrot and began levering the back off Martha's phone.

"What are you doing?" Martha asked in some alarm.

"In order to locate the Doctor's phone in space and time this thing must have a pretty efficient chronomanipulator of its own," Jack explained with a small grunt of effort as the phone refused to yield to his attempts. "If we can reverse-engineer a small pocket of backwards-running - _ow_ \- well, we can warn the Doctor and he'll have about an hour of foreknowledge in which to capture the Master before the unstable time paradox collapses."

"And that's why you're trying to crowbar the back off my phone?"

"No, he's doing that because he's 'a technological imbecile'," Suzy said with relish, "And 'although he scores highly in charisma, marksmanship and physical fitness, his mental agility and problem-solving areas need serious attention,' according to his file."

"What file?" Martha asked, frowning as the metallic carrot thing slipped and took another chunk out of Jack's finger.

"His Time Agency file," Suzy said, pointing at the gently glowing screen of the monitor nearest her. "It just came up."

"What?" Jack blurted, abandoning the phone and bleeding discreetly. "You shouldn't be able to access that. No one should. Especially not here."

"I didn't," Suzy pointed out, "it just appeared." She scrolled down the screen. "Oh, very interesting. Apparently you have five reprimands for time-looping and three for general non-chronologous behaviour from your training period."

"Time-looping?" Ianto asked.

"Repeating the same period of time over and over until there several chronologous clones of yourself," Jack said distractedly, "it counts as cheating, but allows you to study for exams more effectively."

"Or in this case, to have sex with yourself," Suzy smirked. "I'm sure no one is remotely shocked. And … oh. Apparently you're considered a serious defection threat."

"Now isn't the time for being snide, Suzy."

"You were recommended for a … a partial mind-wipe?" Suzy peered at the screen. "What's that? I'm assuming it's what it sounds like. No wonder you have such a bloody unethical approach to other people's memories – "

"I've never heard of it."

"It's on _your_ file," Suzy pointed out, waving her hand at the screen. "Which according to the tag comes courtesy of one Ceno Blackamoor."

"…What?" Jack scrabbled over a table and all but shoved her aside to get a good look at the screen. "Why would Ceno be sending my files _here_? And how did she get access to them in the first place? She used to work in _wages_ for fuck's – "

"Jack," Ianto said, reaching out with his good arm (the distinction was hardly a noteworthy one, they were both in a terrible state), "we have no idea what you're talking about."

"'This man is thought to be living under the assumed identity of Jack Harkness'," Suzy continued, "'he is to be considered an enemy of the Agency and a threat to chronocontinuity. He is extremely dangerous and should be shot on sight'." She beamed up at Jack. It was not a very friendly smile. "So, no _new_ information, then."

"They don't know he can't die?" Martha interjected.

"Apparently not. Jack, give _me_ the phone," Suzy sighed. "I'll sort your time thing."

"Do you know how to do that?"

"I will soon," Suzy moved over and let him get a full view of the screen. "Perhaps you could figure out how these files ended up here, and where from, and _why_."

"Er," Jack said warningly, "_who_ gives the order around here?"

"_Who_ is the wanted criminal?" Suzy asked, unscrewing the back of the phone deftly.

"Who's meant to be dead?" Jack retorted.

" … that would be both of us, _sir_," Suzy picked out something small and green from the phone. "Huh, it's organic. Martha, you think you can run an analysis, even a basic one, with the equipment we have left?"

"Orders," Jack reminded her from his spot at the console, page after page of misdemeanours and training information flashing across the screen.

"Criminal," Suzy said.

"_Murderer_," Jack retorted, "Also, dead."

"Shut _up_ the pair of you," Ianto groaned. "Jack, maybe one of the …of the others, after they got all … puppety … maybe they ordered those files somehow? Maybe they're working with the Time Agency."

"The Time Agency don't have dimensional travel, it's prohibited," Jack muttered, "And that's where those puppet-master things – I can't believe I just said that. Think of a better word, Ianto."

"Zombies?"

"_No_. Jack scrolled faster. "And to the best of my knowledge they don't use frequency control, they're much less subtle - _hey_, they said I got a second percentile result in that test and it was a _first_. Bastards."

"Jack," Martha sighed. "Concentrate."

"Okay," he said after a minute or so of careful scrutiny. "These aren't legally-requested copies, they don't have the watermark. But they _were_ sent from inside the Agency by someone who knows most but not all of the protocols. And that someone isn't likely to have been Ceno."

"Why not?" Ianto asked.

"Been dead for quite a while, and if someone asked her to do this while she was alive she'd have mentioned it to me. Also, the files were pretty up to date – not the _date_ they were when she died, either."

"Were you aware that you're not making any sense?" Suzy asked, removing four very small screws from something inside the phone.

"Be quiet, I'm thinking," Jack muttered, pursing his lips. "It …logically … this _mindwipe_ deal … maybe they used me."

"… what?" All three remaining members of Torchwood stared at him in total incomprehension.

"No, listen, it makes perfect logical sense. They sent _me_ into a point in the future to send these files here – I don't have watermarking rights, never did, but I _do_ know most of the protocols – with the best information there was, the most recent information they had. I would have used Ceno's account because she and I had a _thing_ and I have her passwords, and I never used my own if someone else's was available because … anyway. Here, because …someone was here to collect them? Ten they did this … wipe … thing." Jack frowned. "Because they already distrusted me."

"This is some strange definition of 'logical sense' that has no bearing on the conventional one," Suzy said into the back of the phone.

"It's seaweed," Martha said in surprise.

"Oh, no, Jack, there's a contender for your throne," Suzy muttered. "_Seaweed_?"

"The thing you pulled out of my phone," Martha explained crossly, "it's semi-sentient …kelp." She regarded it suspiciously. "It … it _oxygenates_ my phone?"

"Well presumably whatever else your friend the Doctor has done to it emits a lot of carbon dioxide," Suzy suggested, removing something else. "Ingenious. If I invert this thing here … Ianto, don't just stand there, pass me that little grey thing – "

"I don't take orders from you," Ianto said stiffly.

"But you'll take them from the wanted Time Fugitive over there? What selective morality you have, Ianto Jones," Suzy grabbed the pill-like object herself and shoved it into the back of the phone with the tip of her finger. "Just what I'd expect from a man who kept his robot girlfriend in the basement – which is such a _euphemistic_ sentence it's hard to believe it doesn't actually refer to a vibrator up your behind."

"Suzy," Jack rasped, "can you possibly work without being a bitch, please? I'm trying to think."

"It said you're a defection risk," Ianto said, turning his back very deliberately on Suzy and subjecting Jack to one of his coolest, most empty stares. "Defecting to who?"

"Whom," Suzy corrected under her breath.

"I don't know," Jack muttered, still transfixed by the details of his life flickering on screen. "They've cut whole chunks out of my file. And I don't _remember_."

* * *

"I don't remember," the Doctor said cheerfully, "And while the threats are appreciated and of _course_ I take you seriously … I still don't remember." He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger and smiled again. "Wiped it completely from my mind. Didn't want anyone to … oh, you know. Torture it out of me and seize the incalculable power of Rassilon for their own nefarious ends. That sort of thing." He licked his teeth thoughtfully. "Good word, 'nefarious', isn't it?"

"You wouldn't have destroyed _all_ knowledge of their location, Doctor," the Master said patiently. "You're cautious. There _will_ be some way to extract it from you." He cracked his knuckles again with a pensive expression. "Mm. I want to say I'm not going to enjoy what I'm about to do to you but … that would be lying."

"It won't help you at all," the Doctor said rather more calmly than he felt. "I really did cut it all out of my head. For safe keeping, you understand. The only person who knows where they are doesn't know that they know. You know?"

"And the knowledge will come to them when you die, is that it?" The Master gave him a distinctly hungry look. It was also a distinctly _murderous_ look.

The Doctor shook his head as the Master advanced on the dome like a large, angry cat. "Nope. When both of us are utterly gone from the universe, then the information filters into their subconscious. Through dreams that they can safely ignore if they so wish, Neat, don't you think?"

The Master kicked the dome, sending a shower of sparks into the Doctor's face.

"I like the new skin colour, by the way," the Doctor said idly, wiping something out of his eye. "Black suits you. I'm looking forwards to being ginger, myself."

"There will be a way around this little _trick_ of yours."

"Oh, undoubtedly."

"And I _will_ find it."

"There you go with the imperative again. I don't think you will, you know."

"And why not?"

"Not clever enough."

"I will destroy your silly pets," the Master said, striding over to the hub of the TARDIS and toying idly with a few switches, caressing a couple of panels and jerking back some levers with more ease than the Doctor had ever managed. The Doctor winced and made a face. "And I will be sure to do so slowly and painfully."

"Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you," the Doctor said in a low voice.

The Master glared at him over his shoulder. "You're keeping something from me."

"Oh, hundreds of things. I don't really trust you, you see. Hard to imagine, I know." The Doctor tapped the inside of the dome. "I mean," he continued, "if _I_ were you I'd be a nicer and more intelligent you than you are. I really am quite clever, you see. In fact, if I were you, you'd be a lot like me. You could argue that I'm you now, in fact, especially since you used _my_ DNA to regenerate this time."

The Master pointed the Doctor's screwdriver at the dome. "It will take three minutes to get to earth," he said in a very dangerous and quiet voice, "do you want to find out how much pain you can endure in that time?"

"Mm." The Doctor looked thoughtful. "No, thank you, I'll pass. I'm not fond of pain. If you're offering tea, though – "

The Master switched on the screwdriver, which spat a beam of blue energy at the dome. It deflected off the surface, bounced off the ceiling and vanished into the grating in the floor. The TARDIS shook briefly but righted herself.

"That's the thing about prison cells," the Doctor said conversationally, sitting back down on the floor. "You have to take into account who designed them. Me, I know I've got this _wicked_ mean temper, and I know you'd wind me up something terrible, so I made the dome resistant to sonic beams. Good, isn't it?"

* * *

  
1\. Because it's Torchwood, and they can swear on Torchwood!


	6. Part 6

Half a universe away the Doctor checked his co-ordinates again and felt a brief flash of guilt for enjoying the chase so much. Martha would probably not approve. Rose would've, of course – she'd have loved every minute as much as he did, treating it as the wild ride it really was – the Doctor stamped on that thought wearily and instead contemplated The Next Step.

His contemplations were rudely interrupted by the gratingly tinny jingle of his phone playing – oh, why had he let Jack _anywhere near_ it – some dreadful disco hit. He considered ignoring it, but instead fumbled for the little thing amongst the embarrassing mess under the TARDIS hub. He dropped it twice and eventually pressed the thing to his ear. "Hello! Martha! Your timing is impeccably bad. How are you?"

"Doctor?" she sounded relieved, out of breath, and slightly frantic. The Doctor felt a mild twinge of worry – clearly _something_ was up, but she was just going to have to deal with it herself. That was the whole point of staying behind. "You're okay? Are you still heading after – after him?"

The Doctor took the phone away from his ear and stared at the screen briefly. "Where are you calling from?"

"It's more a matter of when," Martha said desperately. "Listen, Doctor, when you get there, _don't leave the TARDIS_. It's a trap."

"Uh-huh." The Doctor reached over the central hub of the TARDIS and poked a switch twice, which refused to move until he'd skipped around the whole of the hub and shoved at it with the heel of his hand. Mental note to get some more WD-40, there, or fish oil or something. The old girl was getting a bit stiff. "How do you know this, Martha? When are you calling from? You're not supposed to be able to bend the timeline like this – "

"Doctor! This is – he has you _prisoner_ right now. Well, not you. Future-you – Jack's making really weird hand-signals. Forget I said that. Please, please, just … when you get there, please wait for him to come to _you_?" she sounded quite wound up. The Doctor wondered briefly what else was going on, what precisely had _happened_ to Cardiff in Jack's absence, and whether he ought to go back and help; he reminded himself who he was chasing and what that worthy adversary already had in his possession. At the very least he should get the Vortex Manipulator off –

"Martha, I'm …sort of busy right now. I'm sorry."

"Doctor, _please_ just listen – "

"Stop. Mucking about. With the timeline," he said sternly, and hit the 'end call' button, feeling perhaps just the tiniest bit hypocritical. After all, he'd been infamous for timeline meddling, mucking about with and general meddling. Exiled for it, even. Then again, Martha didn't know that and she was supposed to have some sort of a conscience.

He twisted the rings on his screwdriver impatiently and set them to "bind".

* * *

"He wouldn't listen," Martha said miserably, handing the phone to Jack, her shoulders slumped in defeat. "He _never_ listens to me."

"He rarely listens to me either," Jack sighed.

_whomwhomwhomwhomwhom_ echoed through the headquarters, a thrumming rising out of the debris and the chaos like a self-generating tornado; in the one mysteriously empty spot in the untidy and singed room that used to be the nerve centre of Torchwood, something large and blue began to materialise.

"What the _fuck_?" Suzy said under her breath, and Ianto blinked blearily.

"Is that a –"

"No, it's a TARDIS," Jack interrupted with a look of unbridled glee. "He _listened_."

The front door creaked open and after a moment a shock of exceptionally messy brown hair poked through the gap, followed by some glasses. "Right," the Doctor said, stepping out of the bright blue box and rubbing his hands together, "where am I?"

"Torchwood headquarters," Jack grinned. Martha shot past him like a rocket in a leather jacket and hugged the Doctor so had he almost fell down. "Did you get him?"

"Love what you've done with the place – no computers getting in the way, fantastic _scorched_ décor, lax on the dusting – what? Yes and no," the Doctor scowled. "I didn't find him this time round because _someone_ called me and disrupted my tracking instruments. I just ended up being dragged back here. On the other hand, he didn't find _me_, which I gather I have you and your team to thank for – " the Doctor lifted his arms up so Martha could squash him a little tighter. "You inverted the – ow, Martha, I need those ribs – to create a backwards running period of … well, you know. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, am I right?"

"Not just me," Jack said, radiating pride from every pore.

"In fact _mostly_ not you," Suzy muttered, folding her arms.

"But it was your idea, wasn't it?" the Doctor didn't wait for him to answer. "Jack, Jack, Jack …whatever am I going to do with you?"

"Apparently not thank me for saving your life."

The Doctor gently pried Martha off his ribcage and sighed. "What is it going to take to convince you that the rules are there for a _reason_?"

"He had you prisoner," Martha pointed out, looking a little put out and quite dishevelled.

"Yes, which I would have got out of sooner or later," the Doctor said, "I'm _me_, Martha, I'm very clever. I would have come up with something. I always do. And at least when he had me locked up or whatever it was I knew where he was! Now he could be anywhere with that bloody Vortex Manipulator which I can't _track_ anymore thanks to Mr. Clevertrousers over there."

"Is he always this ungrateful?" Suzy asked.

"No," Jack sighed, "normally he's worse."

"Introductions!" The Doctor sprang forwards and said, "Hello, I'm the Doctor, and you're …"

"Ianto Jones," Ianto said rather sourly. "We hear a _lot_ about you."

"Ianto Jones, you have a fractured collarbone," the Doctor said, pulling his screwdriver out of his breast pocket and fiddling with the settings. "Please, allow me."

Suzy's eyes lit up like exploding firework factories as the Doctor reset Ianto's collarbone and gave him an encouraging smile which he did not return. "What's that?" she murmured.

"Sonic screwdriver. Most useful thing I ever invented. _Some_ people swear by laser screwdrivers but personally I think that's just showy. Much like your Captain here turning up with a SONIC BLASTER –" the Doctor aimed his last words at Jack.

"Nothing wrong with that," Jack muttered.

"Apart from the tendency to run out of power when you need it the most," the Doctor smiled and directed his attention back to Suzy abruptly. Suzy was still staring the screwdriver with her fingers twitching covetously. "It only needs recharging every ten or twenty years," he said proudly. "Unlike _some people_'s silly guns – " the Doctor peered at her and said in a much lower and less friendly voice: "Suzy Costello. Aren't you dead?"

"I was," Suzy didn't take her eyes off the screwdriver.

"And now someone has been messing around with the rules again," the Doctor tapped his lip with an expression of exaggerated confusion. "I wonder who that could have been …JACK!"

"We needed her help."

The Doctor stuffed the screwdriver back in his pocket with an exasperated grunt. "WE don't go raising people from the dead just because we _need_ them, Jack."

"Doctor," Suzy said suddenly, cutting across the tiff that was threatening to start, "surely you know all this rubbish about him when you took him on?"

"Hardly. I just went and picked him off a bomb that was about to explode, because Rose thought he had a nice arse – "

"Er, AND because I was about to sacrifice my life to save those of hundreds of people, _thank you_," Jack reminded him. "I wasn't even immortal then. That was it. One life, about to disappear." He looked at Ianto, who was examining the ceiling.

"Well," Suzy said softly to the Doctor, "His Time Agency files turned up here, so if there's anything _else_ you don't want coming as a surprise you can always –"

"_Here_? How?"

"We think," Martha said, "that the Time Agency sent Jack … a Jack from the past to send their best information here …then wiped his mind. Er."

"_We_ don't think that," Ianto reminded her. "Jack thinks that. _We_ don't have any idea what he's talking about. As usual."

"It makes sense," the Doctor said, eliciting a disbelieving stare from the remainder of the room, "but why _here_?" He frowned. "…unless." He tapped his lip again. "Jack, there's something you've left out. What is this place?"

"…Torchwood headquarters, I told you," Jack said, looking confused and ever so slightly duplicitous.

"And it is …" the Doctor prompted.

"…sitting on a time rift?"

"Yes, but it is also … _Jack_, come on. You've been hiding some very important detail here."

"When isn't he?" Suzy muttered, hitting perfection unison with Ianto on the "isn't".

"Jack," the Doctor repeated, drawing his name out. "This isn't JUST the Torchwood headquarters, is it? And it's not on the rift because you're such a _responsible_ man and need to protect people from the side effects either. _Is_ it?"

Jack took a sudden and abiding interest in his feet, much to everyone's surprise, and said with the unconcealable grin of a naughty schoolboy. "Oh, alright." He stuck his hands in his pockets and said quietly, "It's a TARDIS."

The silence before Torchwood's united "WHAT?" was brief but precious. Suzy and Ianto merely sounded confused; Martha sounded incredulous, and the Doctor merely nodded. "So," the Doctor said, "I have parked my TARDIS in yours. I'm sure you're very pleased with yourself, Jack. _Where did you find it?"_

Jack was clearly struggling to contain a grin. "In a gravel pit outside some unpronounceable village in Mid-Glamorgan in 1978. I had to buy a _pit pony_ to get it back here, and it was disguised as a _fridge_ at the time so I got some funny looks – " he looked around at the faces of his team and added, "sorry, guys. I meant to tell you."

"And when were you planning on mentioning to _me_ that you'd stolen a TARDIS?" the Doctor asked in his very quiet and very dangerous voice.

"I didn't _steal_ it," Jack bridled. "It was just _there_, buzzing away half-underwater. As far as I knew there were no other Time Lords but you, and you'd vanished on me."

"And you've never thought who it might _belong_ to since? No, of course you haven't. You don't _think_, you just run in waving a gun around," the Doctor sighed, and somewhere behind him Suzy snickered.

"Is there any chance," Ianto asked, "you could save this for later? It's just that we have a lot going on. Team members to rescue – "

"Excellent idea, Ianto Jones," the Doctor beamed. "Why don't you make us a pot of tea, and we'll figure out what's going on here. Jack?"

"What?"

"_Update_, please. You're so slow" The Doctor frowned to himself. "Why am I asking you? Martha! What's happening? Why is Cardiff even more unsightly than usual?"

"Jack thinks – " Martha began, but the Doctor interrupted her.

"Can we please dispense with what Jack thinks? It's already been established that he really _doesn't_."

Suzy said, "the arrival of three possibly or probably extra-dimensional beings using what Captain Harkness here calls an S.E.P. field has resulted in most of the city turning into even bigger mindless drones than they already were." She gave the Doctor a piercing look. "Jack maintains that this is down to frequency control, and we don't have any evidence to contradict that yet."

The Doctor spun around and gave Jack a similarly piercing look. "When did _you_ learn about S.E.P. fields? You don't _look_ like you've been dimension-hopping – all your limbs are the same length, for one – "

"Met a guy."

"There's _always_ a guy with you. Or a girl. Or a hermaphroditic self-replicating tentacle monster. What guy?"

Suzy snickered again. Ianto, busy with the kettle, still moving sluggishly, turned to frown at her.

"Friend of yours," Jack said with studied nonchalance, so studied that no one was taken in by it for even a moment. The kettle boiled, and with some awkwardness Ianto began filling the teapot. "Travels on a Chesterfield sofa. Sort of auburn hair? Claims to be Betelguisian?" Jack put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. "Him. He taught me a _lot_ of things. Even mentioned that the kind of circuitry in TARDISes is considered old hat were he's from – a more advanced dimension, he said – "

"Yeah, well, he lies a lot," the Doctor muttered.

" – kind of space and time drives beyond the imaginings of Time Lords, even," Jack continued, his eyes shining. "I kept a bit of the sofa upholstery, that's how he got a glimpse inside the S.E.P.; observational instruments plus an anomalous object – or in this case a fragment of one – and it makes _sense_ that they're cross-dimensional beings if they're using an S.E.P. _and_ frequency control, Doctor, it – "

The Doctor made an exasperated noise, grabbed Jack by the ears, and kissed him briefly but hard, on the mouth. Across the room and through the remains of what had been the partition wall around the kitchenette, Ianto's knuckles whitened around the teapot handle.

"Jack," the Doctor said, stepping back and releasing his head but maintain fierce eye-contact, "shut up."

"That was hardly fair," Martha said almost _sotto voce_, under the clink of china hitting china.

"I like you _much_ better than Jack," the Doctor assured her with a friendly pat to what – because he wasn't looking – turned out to be her chest, "_you_ let me get a word in edgeways occasionally."

"Pot! Kettle!" Jack called in a boneless and unoffended manner.

"I _meant_ on poor Ianto," Martha said through gritted teeth, but the Doctor wasn't listening. There was the unmistakeable _ping_ of china being chipped in the kitchenette.

"What was that about tracking and vortex manipulators?" Suzy asked abruptly, viewing the tension in the room with palpable disdain. Martha looked for a moment like she was going to _hug_ her just for the subject change.

"A vortex manipulator is a device that projects a localised area of Chronoanomalous energy – " the Doctor began, but Suzy just rolled her eyes as though he'd said something painfully obvious.

"I know what it _is_," she said scornfully, "Jack was trotting around with one for years, do you think I wouldn't have found out what it was? It _is_ the same one, right?"

"Right," Jack said weakly. "Ianto, how's that tea coming?"

Ianto said nothing for quite a long moment, then: "We're out of milk, sir."

"You think you can get some kind of fix on it?" the Doctor asked, roundly ignoring everyone else, just staring at Suzy with the fascination of a small boy who has just found a new kind of beetle. "With the instruments you have here?"

"I might need some of yours," Suzy admitted, "but really it's more dependent on what happens to me when you find this Master person."

"… what do you mean? Nothing happens to you, hopefully. I'd just bung him in the dome and we'll go on our merry way until I can find somewhere a bit more convenient to stash him." The Doctor looked perplexed.

"I'm not going back in the morgue drawer as soon as you've stopped finding me useful," Suzy said with concrete firmness.

"You _are_ dead, Suzy Costello."

"So's Jack. It hasn't stopped him from bonking his way around the planet, has it?" She gave the Doctor a small yet slightly terrible smile. "I can find your 'Master' if you give me the tools, 'Doctor', but I'm not going to if my only reward is 'knowledge of a job well done' and back to the cold …the darkness … the emptiness …" she stared past them for a while, her features frozen in place.

"Give me your wrist," the Doctor said thoughtfully.

"I _have_ a pulse," Suzy said irritably, but she held her arm out to him anyway. The Doctor felt for the pulse and pulled a face somewhere between contemplative and confirmative.

"The same as Jack's," he said, letting her arm drop.

"Hang on, when did you take Jack's pulse?" Martha asked.

For an answer the Doctor merely pointed to his mouth, and Jack made a disappointed noise.

"Of course it is," Suzy said, looking at her veins. "He's the one who resurrected me. That's largely how the glove works – "

"Mitten," Ianto corrected, handing her a cup of black tea.

" – it draws on the resurrector, and eventually drains them, transferring the injuries to – Ianto, I'm not calling it _that_." She sipped her tea and made a surprised but not entirely negative face. "I can only assume that since Jack _can't_ be drained, that's why they chose him. Or he volunteered. It's hardly because of the deep emotional connection we have."

"Yes, yes," the Doctor said impatiently, "I know how the Hands of Raspula work. Weren't there originally two of them?"

"This is a replica," Ianto said, but the Doctor just ignored him again.

"No matter. What interests me is the rhythm you have going in your pulse. Both of you."

"Rhythm?" Martha glared at him. "Stop talking in code."

The Doctor drummed his fingers on Suzy's arm until she jerked it out of the way - _DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_ \- and Martha's eyes widened slowly. "No."

"Yes." The Doctor smiled. "This should make tracking down my old friend very easy indeed. His consciousness has left an imprint in Jack's – and now Suzy's by proxy – biorhythms. Oh, brilliant. Jack, I could _kiss_ you, I really could. Even if this is all your fault."

"Once was enough," Ianto said under his breath as his fingers tightened convulsively around the handle of another mug.

"Come on! Not a moment to lose!" the Doctor exclaimed, ushering them into the TARDIS. He paused. "Did you say there was no milk left? That's a shame. I do all my best thinking after a nice cup of tea." He gave Jack a push between the shoulderblades. "That's where you're going wrong, Jack. All that coffee. It makes you jumpy and … gun-wavy. Don't touch that, please –"

Suzy jerked her hand away from the hub guiltily, but her expression remained that of a small child let loose in a sweet shop, and her fingers continued to twitch. Ianto, by stark contrast, seemed wholly unimpressed.

"_This_ travels in space?"

"And time."

"It looks like an accident," Ianto said stiffly. "Why does it look like a police box on the outside?"

"The chameleon circuits – " Martha and Jack said at the same time, and dissolved into unexpected mutual giggles.

Ianto boggled. "You're laughing?"

"He won't be in a minute," Suzy said a touch smugly. "I need to attach things to his brain.


	7. Part 7

"Jack," the Doctor said in an exasperated voice, "your brain is messy."

"… I know."

"I mean, it's completely … your personal signature and those of about _forty_ people are all intertwined … how much time travel were you doing without a vessel before Rose and I picked you up?" the Doctor sucked his teeth. "How is Suzy supposed to get a fix on _anything_ in your horribly muddy brain?"

"I'll get something," Suzy assured him, gritting her teeth.

Jack raised his eyebrows, trying to look around his own ear to see what Suzy was doing. She was, he knew, currently wrist-deep in his skull with some fairly vicious-looking bits of wire. The smell of freshly-drilled bone filled the close air of the TARDIS, and his own drying blood tickled his face. Jack peered back at where Ianto was watching him anxiously – Martha was apparently still leaning over his poor exposed _brain_ and giving Suzy a little direction (Suzy said she'd never done brain surgery before, but from the intimidating look in her eye she'd clearly wanted to, probably on someone who was still alive). It was only about the fifty-eighth weirdest thing that had happened to Jack while technically still on earth, but it probably ranked quite high up on Ianto's list. He looked a little green in the face.

Actually, everything looked kind of green.

"Hey!" Jack growled, when he'd figured out why. "Watch what you're doing up there with my _brain_."

"Oh come on," Suzy said lightly, "it's not the organ doing the decision-making." Jack was about to protest when Suzy added, "got it!"

Amplified, sounding as though it was being beaten out on a series of floor toms, the drumming filled the TARDIS like a rock concert. Jack closed his eyes, the reverberations through the TARDIS floor perfectly attuned to each thump and crash of blood in his veins, and the Doctor said, "He's still on earth. He's here. Well, Norway, but that's close enough. Not like it's the Horsehead Nebula."

"_Norway_?" Suzy asked incredulously. "If I was trying to take over the world I wouldn't be doing it from _Norway_."

Something Suzy had no doubt thought about quite a lot. Jack said nothing.

"Rubbish!" the Doctor cried, sounding his old glib self again. "Norway's perfect – plenty of natural resources, low population density so there's no one to come poking around in his business, and the food's fantastic." He bounded past Jack's head and began poking and slapping at switches in his characteristic peculiar little TARDIS-starting dance. "Next stop, the inland end of the Hardanger Fjord! Suzy, be a good girl and do Jack's head back up, would you? If you're not careful something'll fall into his brain cavity and he'll start having _ideas_."

"I'll do it," Martha suggested hastily, and Suzy sauntered past Jack's face on her way to peer at the hub.

"Ah," the Doctor said, pushing her gently away with the flat of his hand, "I'm afraid I really can't let you near this, Ms Costello."

Suzy's expression was nothing short of murderous.

As Jack felt the prick of needlepoint against the skin of his scalp he called across the wide gulf between himself and the hub, "Doctor – what are you expecting to find when we get there, anyhow?"

"Oh, you know," the Doctor said evasively, tugging another lever as the TARDIS shuddered and Martha swore quietly under her breath, "stuff."

"How's he achieving the frequency control?" Jack persisted.

"Erm," the Doctor said cheerfully, then, "Oh, well _done_, Martha. Those are very neat."

"You don't know, do you?" Jack asked as something wet began dabbling at the dried blood on the sides of his face.

"Not as such, no," the Doctor admitted, "but given the evidence I'd say we're looking for a self-generated dimensional tear encapsulating one of those paradox engines he's so very fond of."

"Of which he is so very fond," Suzy muttered, trying to peer over the Doctor's shoulder at the navigation system. It should have been easy – she was five inches or so taller than him – but the Doctor had this habit of being directly in her line of sight without ever appearing to actually move.

"That doesn't sound good," Jack said, feeling his skin growing over the stitches already as Martha tied off the final end of the surgical thread.

"It's not," the Doctor agreed. "And if we can separate the paradox engine from the tear I _promise_ I'll let you shoot it." The TARDIS shook again, and finally froze as though it had never moved. "We're here." He straightened his tie, and Jack threw him a quizzical look. "I intend to save the world while looking _good_ this time," he added, gesturing to the door.

"You met Oscar Wilde," Jack pointed out, and as Suzy cautiously yanked the door open the Doctor sashayed past them both and smirked from the doorway.

"I taught him everything he knew. Er, whatsyerface," the Doctor added, nodding at Ianto, "I need you to stay here and mind the TARDIS. No point in making the same mistake twice."

"But making a different mistake is just fine," Suzy sighed, giving Ianto a sceptical glance. She followed the Doctor out of the door and immediately cursed.

"Yes," the Doctor observed, wet up to the ankles on the pebble-spattered shore, "I do seem to have misjudged the distance slightly. Come on!"

Since he was a gentleman, and she'd sewn up his scalp without ruining his hair or dropping buttons or anything onto his naked brain, Jack gave Martha a piggy-back through the shallow, very cold and clear water up to the little beach.

"Why doesn't the water just rush in?" Martha asked, looking back at the incongruous blue box sticking out of the still, calm slate-coloured water when she was safely ashore. "The TARDIS is lower than the level of the fjord."

"Because that," the Doctor said severely, polishing the lenses of his glasses on the end of his tie, "would be embarrassing."

"That's not scientific!" Suzy called indignantly back over her shoulder – she was already at the edge of the beach, lifting her leg to mount the overhanging lip of short, coarse turf.

"No," the Doctor agreed, putting his glasses on, "but it takes less time to explain than the reality, which is horribly complicated and involves all these dreadful polysyllables, and nobody likes a show-off. Especially not a polysyllabic show-off. Urgh. And be fair, it was a _silly_ question." He peered after her. "Excellent! That _does_ look like the best place to start looking." He bounded up the bank in excited pursuit, and patted her companionably on the arm.

Suzy pinched the back of her own hand and screwed up her face. "Have I gone mad?" she asked.

Before them rose a huge black slab of some unidentifiable material; unidentifiable because it didn't bear looking at – the eyes slid off it, one way or another, and found themselves looking elsewhere without really noticing that their focus had changed. Trying to look directly at it and concentrating on doing so produced a mental state almost identical to simultaneously poking a sore tooth with a metal toothpick while having one's eyeball sucked.

"_Urgh_," Martha said, looking away. "That's horrible."

"That's a dimensional tear," the Doctor said, still gazing at it with one eye shut and his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. "Don't get any closer. The pull is quite strong."

"There's a sign," Suzy said, turning away from the tear with an expression of relief, "just here. To the right. Says 'trespassers will be executed'."

"Nice to be warned, I s'pose," the Doctor said absently, then – "JACK PUT THAT GUN AWAY _RIGHT NOW_."

Jack complied somewhat sulkily and gestured with his head to the left of the tear. "I thought I saw something moving in there."

"There" was a low wooden house that looked as though it had been picked from a catalogue of Twee Rural Dwellings That Couldn't Possibly Exist In The Real World. It had fretwork. It had red linen curtains. It had an air of indisputable menace and one door opening straight into the dimensional tear.

"Maybe you should let him keep the gun out," Martha suggested, eyeballing the arrangement a little nervously.

"_No_." The Doctor squinted at the little house. It seemed to shimmer a little at the end nearest the tear but appeared quite solid the further it got from it.

"Doctor," Jack said in a very low voice, "the drums are getting louder."

"Then this is the place we want," the Doctor said with completely artificial cheeriness. "Jack?"

"Doctor?"

"Put the safety thingy on your gun and you can have it out. _Just_ this once."

The closer they got to the house, the more bizarre it revealed itself to be. There was no clear line of division but at one end it was a real and tangible wooden building (albeit a ridiculously fairytale one) and at the other it was more of a mirage, the _idea_ of a building and the possibility of one intertwined, and three shadows moved like funeral barges past the curtained windows, always close together.

Jack began to wish rather irrationally that he'd brought a bigger gun as the Doctor shrugged and pulled open the door set in the dead centre of the building, halfway between material and immaterial.

"Oh," the Doctor said in a rather sad sort of way.

The only impression anyone else got of the beings that faced them was that there were three, and that their faces were hard to look directly at – one was female, the other two not, and their movements and words seemed to arrive straight in the brain without using the usual routes at all.

"Doctor," said one, pleasantly. "So nice to see you."

"Three-in-One," he said in strangled tones, then a little more politely, "You're dead."

"There's a lot of it going around," said another, and Jack got the impression that he and Suzy had been gestured to somehow, although by whom and with which body party he had no idea.

"Not in _my_ dimension," said the female, "where I-we is from the war still rages. It is you who are gone. Perished trying to operate that dreadful machine."

"The cruciform – "

You would have killed us all, Doctor," said one, thought Jack could hardly hear the words over the drumming inside his skull, like a marching band at a rave. "That was your collateral, was it not? The Master has told us everything; you were to end the time war at _at any cost_."

Jack was expecting the Doctor to say something like, 'and how many _more_ have died since I didn't use the cruciform?' or ask some light-hearted but cutting question, but the Doctor turned to Martha and said, "this is rather what I thought it might be, really. He's using a hive mind to refine the frequency control. Quite ingenious. Utterly unethical, but ingenious all the same. Opening a dimensional tear was a bit messy, though – it's not like Three-in-One here was the only hive mind in history."

"But we are the only _human_ one, Doctor," said the female, and Jack found himself putting the gun back in his shoulder holster. It was the last thing he wanted to do – the gun fit so perfectly in his hand he could and often _did_ sleep with it there – but his hands moved like distant echoes of themselves, each twitch of his nervous system hitting a "da" in the ceaseless, deafening _DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_

His jaw felt heavy, and glued shut. Like something had got into his muscles, something that went _DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_ and coiled up all his nervous responses into some other place where they received no reply.

"Oh?" the Doctor said with a faint smile, "so that's relevant, is it?" He looked interested, the kind of interested that a scientist might be by a new mould, an insulting kind of interest. "Where is he?"

* * *

The thing very few people knew about Ianto Jones, the thing most of the people who knew tended to forget because he was merely a ghost in a perfectly-knotted tie with a tray of tea in his hands and two guns on him at all times, was that he hadn't always worked for Torchwood. He had once, before he was recruited, before he met Lisa, before everything went fucking _wrong_, been training to become a journalist. A real journalist, too, not some gossip-column idiot from the _Daily Moron_, the kind who pokes around and finds things everyone else didn't realise they cared about.

"The word _alleged_ is going to become your best friend, Ianto," his editor had said. "Alleged, and 'double', if we're honest. This isn't a profession that guarantees a long life-expectancy."

Neither was working at Torchwood, it seemed.

He stood still in the TARDIS control room for a moment after his colleagues and the bastard in the brown suit had stepped out into the icy fjord waters, peering not so much at the alien décor as his own memories, flashing past his open eyes. _Guard the TARDIS_. Right. Because Ianto Jones was going to be a great deterrent against this person who could defeat the one person _Jack_ admired.

Still, he might as well do _something_ useful while he was waiting. And Ianto knew exactly which 'something' was most likely to be appreciated.

And if by chance he happened to uncover something interesting while he was trying to find an alternative to the absent milk then, well, he could hardly be blamed, could he? It wasn't like he knew his way around the time machine yet.

Ianto turned to the doorway that apparently led to the kitchen, and shuffled through the next one over instead, all but stuffing his hands in his pockets for an added and pointless air of nonchalance.

He ended up in the kitchen anyway.

"What?" Ianto said, and he returned to the control room, picked another door, and found himself in the kitchen once more.

"For fuck's – " Ianto lamented and backed out into the control room.

Once he'd ended up in the kitchen twice more Ianto took the hint, stopped trying to work out how the hell it was happening, and began ransacking the kitchen cupboards instead. For the most part they yielded impossibly bizarre tools, the odd mouldy apple core and a plethora of condiments; the Doctor, it appeared, had gone to the Jack Harkness School of sane organisation and housekeeping. Or – it was more likely, Ianto thought with a heavy internal sigh – Jack was an alumnus of the Doctor's school of thought.

He shoved a jar of pickled herrings out of the way somewhat savagely and his groping hand came into contact with a tin of condensed milk.

"Yuck," Ianto muttered. Still, it was better than nothing, just about. He took the tin out of the cupboard and frowned at the wall behind it.

There was a large, flat grey switch with a torn piece of paper taped to it with what looked like very old sellotape, the yellowed and crunchy kind. It had "DON'T" written on it in several languages, including one that Ianto had been trying to decipher from a piece of wreckage back at Torchwood headquarters for more than a _year_.

He stared at the switch some more, the condensed milk drooping forgotten in his hand. He was not the kind of man who pushed buttons to see what they did; Ianto Jones was the kind of man who examined them for many hours, wrote a detailed report on his findings and got someone trained or – failing that, and especially at Torchwood 3 – immortal to find out by trial and error what it did. He was not at all keen on the 'error' side of the equation.

He closed the cupboard door and gave the condense milk a slightly rueful look. Black tea seemed to be the order of the day. "If Jack Harkness were here – if I were him – I'd have pushed that bloody thing and taken the consequences," he told the condensed milk.

A moment later he yelped and jumped about a foot in the air as something thin and white popped out of the toaster and landed neatly on the kitchen surface beside it.

Hasty investigation revealed that it was a folded sheet of paper with 'IANTO' printed on it in slightly blotchy letters. Ianto put the condensed milk down gingerly on top of a large grey box with "NO NO NO" stencilled on the side and picked up the folded paper; it was warm to the touch, as though it had just come from a printer. He unfolded it.

_A GOOD THING FOR US ALL THAT YOU ARE NOT JACK HARKNESS._

He read the message a second time. It did not change, or disappear, or turn out to say something completely different to what he had originally thought it said, the way things tended to after three or four days on minimal sleep.

Ianto put the message in the breast pocket of his shirt and – slowly and robotically, concentrating hard on each step – made himself a cup of tea.

He carried the tea back into the control room at a glacial pace and took a long, contemplative slurp. A screen on the hub flashed green and – having got his attention – followed with a scrolling message:

_There's milk under the lateral displacement drive unit._

Ianto spat out his tea over the back of his hand.

_No need to do that._

"Sorry," Ianto said, wiping his chin with his palm. "Which is the lateral displacement drive?"

He stopped with the mug halfway to his lips, and frowned, as he replayed what he had just said in his mind. "I am _not_ taking to a machine."

_You must have shouted at a computer before._

"It didn't exactly shout _back_," Ianto said, slurping his tea a little nervously. "Yuck."

_The lateral displacement drive unit is to the left of your elbow and sticks out at a level with your hip,_ the screen said.

Ianto dipped and picked up a carton of full-fat milk with the day's date stamped on the base, next to, mystifyingly, the words "bottled on". He opened the flaps and said, "er, thank you. What's a … what does the lateral displacement drive _do_?"

_At present it makes milk._

"Is it meant to?" Ianto asked, freezing with the open carton resting against the rim of his mug.

_No. It is broken._

Ianto regarded the milk carton cautiously, and poured.

_The Doctor broke it,_ the screen continued helpfully, _when he was trying to fix our chameleon circuits. He often breaks systems of TARDIS._ The screen flickered. _The Doctor does not really know what he's doing most of the time_.

Ianto put the milk down again with a surprised look and swirled his mug thoughtfully. "He usually – well, Jack seems to think very highly of him. And most people think very highly of Jack. He _seems_ very intelligent. The Doctor, I mean. Jack seems … well, he's … him."

_He has had a lot longer to learn in._ The milk carton disappeared into a hole at the base of the hub, but Ianto wasn't quite sure how. _The Doctor is more than one thousand years old. Jack Harkness is already older than one hundred years. This was our doing; TARDIS wishes to apologise for that mistake._

"I heard about that," Ianto said, taking a sip of his tea. It tasted considerably more pleasant now.

_If you were to spend a millennium roaming the universe you would appear of a similar intelligence,_ the screen added rather reassuringly. _The Doctor was not a genius when he began his travels_.

Ianto nodded, a little mollified, although he wasn't sure he liked hearing so much about the Doctor. A hard knot of coldness in his chest and stomach seemed to have associated itself with the funny little man.

When the gaping void of blackness had opened up in Ianto, with Lisa's death, he had found that Jack was the only person capable of distracting him from it. It was till _ther_, but Jack at least made it less noticeable, less unbearable. He had not been stupid enough to suppose that this was love on either side of the arrangement; he was sure that his capacity for that had fallen into the chasm inside him – but he _had_ also thought that he could easily stand to see Jack plainly and wholly in love with someone else, and he'd been wrong.

_The Doctor still cannot make good tea_, the screen said.

"I can do other things," Ianto muttered into his mug. _Filing_, his brain threw up with a treacherous sneer, _filing and executions and blowjobs_. He drained the mug and peered at the screen expectantly, but until he ran his finger over the warm, electric-tingling glass, there was no reply.

_Would you like TARDIS to provide you with further information?_

"About what?"

_TARDIS has travelled to most of the corners of the universe and many points in time and despite the Doctor's best efforts has not forgotten anything that has been programmed into our central hub,_ the screen said, and somehow Ianto got the impression the time machine was responding reproachfully.

"Tell me about – " Ianto stopped, and recalled a hushed conversation between Martha and Jack, one late night soon after Martha's arrival at Torchwood, when he was theoretically sleeping and in practice sitting behind a wall of filing cabinets chasing his nightmares around with his eyes shut and his ears open. " – Tell me about the Time War."


	8. Part 8

"Doctor," Martha said tentatively, "please stop winding them – it – her – him … stop winding them up."

The Doctor paid about as much attention to her concerns as he ever did.

It happened so quickly that it took Jack's eyes a few seconds to work out what had happened, and he still couldn't swear to _how_ it had. One blink and the slippery Three-in-One was in front of the Doctor, engaging in the standard class of light banter between mortal enemies who were quite convinced that the other was dead, and another blink later the tableaux had changed drastically. The Three-in-One seemed to solidify, although its boundaries were still blurred; it held a blade across Suzy's throat with one of its six hands and the rest of them clawed Suzy back into a position that must have caused her a lot of pain, although her face didn't show any of it.

_DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_, thundered Jack's bloodstream. He knew why she wasn't fighting back.

"We–I require you to return to your funny little time craft, Doctor," Three-in-One said, the blade setting a dimpled line in the expanse of Suzy's neck. Jack thought he'd never seen her look so furious before, that he'd never realised that human eyes _could_ really blaze like hot coals, "or although it is a regrettably overused tactic – I-We will kill this girl."

As Jack had suspected he would, the Doctor just shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. "Okay."

Three-in-One faltered and stared. "Okay, you will leave?" It hazarded.

Bright teeth flashed in a crooked smile, one of those worrying ones that the Doctor sometimes dug up from somewhere in him that made him look more dangerous than the Master and considerably more insane, and the Doctor said, "Okay, kill the girl. If you want. I'm not going anywhere, you know – this dimensional tear is rather _magnetic_, don't you think?"

Three-in-One was quite clear now. It had skins the colour of milky tea and each of its bodies seemed like an exaggeration of the last. Now that it was visible without squinting Jack realised he'd been wrong to think of it as being one female and two males in static bodies; what it _actually_ was, was three bodies through which a two male and one female set of characteristics … drifted. Currently all three faces looked wary and confused. "You're bluffing," said one, temporarily female. "The Doctor does not allow – "

"Ah," the Doctor said peaceably, though there was an undercurrent of something threatening in his voice, "but you come from a dimension where I died during the Time Wars, am I right? You've never met this regeneration, the one who put a _stop_ to the Time Wars before he regenerated again and again. The one who destroyed you. And them. His own people – " the Doctor's eyes flashed and out of the corner of _his_, Jack saw Martha look away. "_You don't know what I'm capable of_."

"But I do," the Master said, emerging through the dimensional tear.

Jack realised he had foolishly been expecting the Master to be his old self, the small but spry and relentlessly fuelled by madness "Harry Saxon". This new Master was not small. He was not small at all. He _hulked_. He looked like some sort of body-building voodoo priest, his dark brown skin overlaid very faintly with a pattern of peacock feathers and his every breath carrying on it the sound of drums. He did, however, still have the air of someone whose inner compass is not really pointing due Sanity.

"Ah, hello again," the Doctor said, and was Jack imagining it or was there a slight tremor in his voice? He must have been imagining it, because the Doctor tended to be less the tremulous kind. He went in more for the subdued, "ah" of terminal balls-up, Jack recalled, and then proceeded to fix things by the skin of _someone's_ teeth. He wished he could persuade _any_ of his muscles to move – an inactive Jack Harkness, Jack thought with desperation, was a useless Jack Harkness.

" – dimensional tear," the Doctor was saying with the polite admiration of someone who can't tell why on earth one might _want_ to wallpaper the bathroom with live weasels, but who is all the same extremely impressed that one has _managed_ to do so, "isn't it a little …complicated? There are _simpler_ ways to control a single measley planet's population, you know. Well, _you_ certainly should know, anyway – you invented at least three of them."

"Oh, this is really just to get your attention, Doctor," the Master said without even a glimmering of his old manic smile. His face was as impassive as a cliff. "I have bigger plans."

"Do go on – "

"Do you think I'm that _stupid_?"

The Doctor made a see-sawing motion with one hand. "Stupid, no. Mad, vain, boastful and prone to – " he waved his hand thoughtfully through the air as though conducting an invisible orchestra, the other still in his pocket, " - _fuck_-ups, yes."

Jack would have winced had he been able to move. He might also have applauded.

"It's alright," the Doctor continued, "you don't _have_ to tell me. I worked it out about ten minutes ago. It would be have been sooner, but I had a headache." He beamed. The Master raised one eyebrow quite slowly, and Jack got the distinct impression that he, Martha trying not to let her mouth hang open, and the Suzy and Three-in-One tableaux, might as well not have been there. The Two Time Lords had more or less forgotten about them entirely, which would have been a more useful omission on the part of the Master, a more useful state of a affairs for an ambush, had more than one of them been capable of movement.

"You're possibly the only person in the universe mad enough to try it," the Doctor continued, his hands back in his pockets again, and he acknowledged with a small smile, "and one of only a very, very few clever enough to pull it off." He scratched his head and pointed at the Master as if he'd just remembered something he had to tell him. "You're going to open the tear until you merge the two realities!" He looked triumphant. "Which would mean I'd not only be dead but also wouldn't have existed for … well, years … and neither would Earth. Or this regeneration of you. Very clever."

"Almost entirely correct," the Master said grudgingly, "but that is now what I intend to do … _unless_ you fail to deliver to me the location of the lost Artefacts of Rassilon, in which case I will take great pleasure in making you _redundant_ to this reality."

The air began to taste strangely of tin, and Jack tried to breathe through his nose, which surprisingly didn't help.

"Ah," the Doctor said, looking quite distressed. It was one of those quiet, "ah, I hadn't thought of that" moments that Jack had been hoping they weren't going to encounter. "I'm afraid I can't really help you. I swore quite an important oath not to reveal their hiding place to anyone. Especially not you."

The Master gave him the kind of stare that could have melted rocks. "And for that you'd sacrifice yourself and everyone on this planet and allow the Time Wars to never have ceased?" he asked. He sounded just a very tiny bit impressed by this.

"Well," the Doctor said, scratching the back of his neck, "that, and I don't know where they are, really."

The Master narrowed his eyes. "Maybe you need a little reminder," he muttered, and waved a hand at the Three-in-One almost dismissively. "Kill her."

The knife _tore_ rather than cut a wet gaping scarlet mouth in Suzy's neck and for a moment she went as stiff as a board. Three-in-One released her from its multi-handed grip, and she fell to the floor in a bloody jumble. Jack was suddenly very glad that he couldn't see Martha's expression.

"I'm not sure what you thought that was going to achieve," the Doctor said, and there was an edge in his voice now, as Three-in-One moved towards Martha like the inexorable march of an oil slick up a pristine beach, or an exceptionally _good_ five-legged race team. "I _don't know_ where the artefacts _are_. The knowledge was erased from my mind precisely so that neither you nor any other Prydonians could try something like this."

The Master glared at him. Just behind his shoulder Jack could see Suzy get up and dust herself somewhat ineffectually. She got to her feet, something dark and heavy-looking in her hand, making her arm hang like a pendulum. He tried to move too, to signal her to aim for the Master and not the Three-in-One despite the latter's sickening advance on Martha, but Jack's muscles remained paralysed by the steady _DUM da-da-da-da DUM da-da-da-da_ throbbing in his bloodstream, in the back of his brain.

Martha twisted hastily away from the Three-in-One, jerking toward the Doctor – and Jack held his breath as Suzy drew nearer. It looked like a rock in her hand, a lump of something like basalt, and Jack wondered a little incredulously if they were about to save the universe using only a sociopath wielding a stone. It would certainly be an _elegant_ solution.

But the Master whipped round and caught her arm in a grip that looked as though it could easily have snapped the bone, and yanked her off-balance. "You breathe very loudly for someone who's meant to be dead," he sighed, twisting her arm around. Jack waited for the crack of bone, for the realisation, for her grimace of pain, but Suzy moved limp as a dead fish _with_ the movement, until she was right beside him. She was by no means short, but the Master's new body dwarfed her.

"_No_," Martha muttered in anguished tones, and dived out of the way of Three-in-One's many clutching hands.

Three-in-One hesitated. "We-I pulled the knife – " it began, confused.

And the world erupted in a shower of chaos.

Martha kicked the female-façade of Three-in-One in the back of the knee so hard that it stumbled towards the eye-straining tear, and like iron filings towards a magnet Three-in-One's other thirds went tumbling after.

At the same moment Suzy jerked in the Master's grip, caught his near eyelid between her teeth, and _ripped it off_, her head snapping to one side. The Master released her arm as he clasped his hand to the free-flowing blood, but not her throat – Jack saw her skin dent as the thick fingers dug in harder –

But it did him no good. Suzy swung the rock so hard at the gleaming pate of the Master that everyone heard the crunch, and a thick spray of crimson blood arced out into the cold, electric air.

The first of Three-in-One slipped almost unnoticed into the tear – unnoticed by everyone but Jack, whose arms and legs suddenly and sheepishly came back under his own command. "Aren't you going to say something witty?" Jack asked, as they stood staring (and in two cases panting) down at the Master's unconscious form.

"What?" Suzy said, somewhat distracted. There were flecks of blood in her eyebrows, and the chunk of basalt still dangled bloody and loose from her hand.

"You just knocked down the Bad Guy," Jack said patiently, rubbing his neck, "it's customary to say – "

"Will, _what the fuck do we do with him when he wakes up_ suffice?" Suzy said acidly.

"Good point."

"_Well_," said the Doctor, rubbing his hands. "We have one unconscious renegade Time Lord – thank you, Suzy – one enormous reality-shattering dimensional tear which is currently about as stable as those things _can_ be, and probably a whopping big Paradox Engine maintaining it. We have _no_ idea what to do with any of these things – and no, Jack, you _can't_ shoot them – or when they're likely to become a threat again." He beamed. "I think it's obvious what we need to do."

Martha made a dubious and mute _go on_ gesture with both hands. Jack saw her glance anxiously at Suzy, and Suzy surreptitiously dropped the rock.

"We need to go back to the TARDIS and consider this over tea!" the Doctor said as though it were the only possible solution to their predicament.

"Are we taking him?" Martha asked, staring at the Master, whose head was still bleeding.

"Ah, yes," the Doctor frowned, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking on his heels. "I'm sure if we all grab a limb – "

Jack couldn't help muttering, "Heard _that_ one before.


	9. Part 9

They splashed and thumped to the TARDIS with no discernable grace and dropped the heavy and barely-breathing body several times. Jack thought he saw Suzy "accidentally" kick him once or twice, and he couldn't quite figure out where her animosity towards the Master came from. Perhaps she was annoyed that he was a bigger psychopathic bastard than her.

Ianto opened the TARDIS door with his sleeves rolled up and a smear of oil or soot or _something_ dark across the bridge of his nose. The fjord water, several inches above the level of the doorway, completely failed to slosh inside the machine. "Is that him?"

"Yes," Martha said shortly, dropping her assigned limb with an _oof_.

"I can assume that the world's been saved, then?"

"Not … entirely," the Doctor said. "Could you please make – "

Ianto pointed wordlessly to a tray of cups and a teapot in a knitted cosy sitting on a somewhat incongruous coffee table in the middle of the control room.

The Doctor grinned. "Well done, Ianto Jones." He picked up a cup and the teapot, and nodded his thanks. "Now. If you'll all just stand back from the Master for a moment – "

The rest of the occupants of the TARDIS spread away from the Master without hesitation and with a palpable sense of relief flooding from them like sweat. The bleeding, knocked out, enormous form of the penultimate Time Lord became the centre of a rapidly-expanding circle of empty space, and, cup in hand, the Doctor backed away to the control centre.

"A little bit further?" he suggested, reaching for a lever and slopping tea over the back of his hand. "Ow!"

As one, the rest of the group Jack was starting to think of as Torchwood, Reduced, shuffled even further back.

"Will I need to move the coffee table, sir?" Ianto asked, and it was a testament to how well Jack thought he knew the man that he only _just_ caught the factitious note in his voice.

"Should be okay, no need for Sir, we're all friends here – " the Doctor paused with his hand on a new-looking lever and frowned to himself, "well, I think we're all friends here, anyone. I'm sure most of you have had sex with each other and tried to kill each other at some point, it seems to happen a lot around Jack, but _broadly speaking_ we're all friends here. Anyway – " he yanked the lever, and something clear and static rose up from between the grating of the TARDIS floor.

It flowed together like mercury and within seconds had formed a solid, transparent shell around the motionless form of the Master, shimmering but certainly _there_.

"What was that?" Suzy asked, peering at it.

"That really doesn't matter at the moment," the Doctor said, taking a sip of his tea. "Have some tea."

"Hey," Jack observed, "he's still wearing my Vortex Manipulator. Shouldn't you let me take that off?"

"I can disable it quite well from over here," the Doctor said, slurping tea.

"That's not the point!" Jack protested, peering through the dome at the leather strap still encircling the Master's thick brown wrist. "It's _mine_ and I need it – "

"No you don't," the Doctor said sternly. "I've told you before, there's no good that can come of you bouncing around the timeline without so much as a craft to keep your artron exposure at safe and sane levels, and if you really want to go and have sex with yourself you can just – "

"_Alright_," Jack said hastily.

"And anyway," the Doctor said over the sound of Suzy snickering, "I know my old enemy. He will have booby-trapped that thing at the first opportunity he had – and he's had plenty – to make sure no one but him can have that useful little toy off his wrist." He sighed. "Very clever person, the Master."

Jack turned just in time to see a look on Ianto's face that he couldn't quite identify.

"Well," he said. "That's one problem out of the way –"

"Yes," the Doctor said, "but we still have an enormous, likely unstable, tear between two dimensions _if not more_ sitting there like a scab on the landscape, and a great big Paradox Engine making sure the thing can't collapse like they usually do."

"Usually do?" Martha asked. She had acquired a cup of tea, although Jack hadn't noticed her do it. "How – how often do these things happen?"

"On purpose, and large enough for a person to slip through, almost never," the Doctor said reassuringly. "But tiny ones big enough to admit ideas occur all the time!" How else would concepts like S.E.P. fields have reached the Master in the first place?"

"Excuse me," Ianto said, but they ignored him.

"Are you quite sure I can't just shoot the Paradox Engine and let the tear collapse?" Jack asked.

"Not now, no," the Doctor said, "if the tear collapses under the weight of its own improbability it'll take us out with it. Not just this planet, either – this whole reality." He slurped his tea again. "Unfortunately – "

"Excuse me," Ianto said, a little louder.

"How about closing the tear down _using_ the Paradox Engine?" Suzy suggested.

"Utterly impossible – the thing was built to maintain and expand the tear. If I know my old fr- enemy, there won't be a reverse setting. He doesn't … really favour back-tracking." Again the Doctor's face was shining as he said this, and Jack wondered if perhaps it was something the Doctor actually admired about the man who'd held them all prisoners and tortured them. He suspected there was a _lot_ he didn't know.

"Excuse me," Ianto said with an air of resignation, "but perhaps you could push the Paradox Engine into the tear? It's possible that – "

As Ianto continued and a look of pleased surprise stole over the Doctor's face, Jack started. In a room containing two deranged geniuses, a former Time Agent, and Martha "Amazingly Resourceful" Jones, he wasn't expecting the answer to come from the Tea, Filing and Blowjobs Guy – but he was obscurely and overwhelmingly proud all the same. After all, he had – alright, he _hadn't_ trained Ianto, the man had come fully-trained from Torchwood One and more than a little distracted, but there had to be _some_ of Jack's input in this solution, didn't there?

"That's _perfect_," the Doctor said at last, and slapped a console getting. "If we can set up the tractor beam – "

"Tell me you didn't just say _tractor beam_," Suzy groaned.

"What? I did! It moves things around, like a tractor. Tractor Beam. What's wrong with that?" the Doctor looked puzzled as the TARDIS began to hum again, and shake.

"It … sounds like the kind of name Ianto would come up with," Suzy said eventually, and Jack fought the urge to hide his face in his hands.

* * *

Martha pushed the TARDIS door open cautiously and looked out at the HQ with an expression of doubt. "It's … still a tip."

"Saving the world doesn't automatically undo the damage," the Doctor said. "_That's_ the hard part, really."

"Is that why you never stick around for it?" Martha murmured, stepping out onto the burnt and crumbling HQ floor. It crunched.

"I suppose I'm going to need quite a _lot_ of Dettol," Ianto said in the voice of one who has resigned himself to tidying up the messes of the world already. "Wonderful."

"_Martha_?"

A familiar and welcome voice rang out over the remains of the HQ, and a moment later Tosh – somewhat smudged but intact – stood swaying and uncertain before the TARDIS.

"You – " Martha watched as Owen and Gwen returned from the autopsy room in a similar state of disarray. "You're okay?"

"I feel a right fucking _idiot_," Owen said, "but we're not hurt or anything."

Gwen closed the gap and grabbed both of Martha's hands in her own. From inside the TARDIS Suzy made a sound Jack had never actually heard her utter before and never wanted to hear from her again. He wasn't sure quite what it was but it made his spine try to escape from his body without waiting for the rest of him. Gwen peered at the TARDIS.

"Is that -?"

"The TARDIS? Yes." Martha let go of her hands – it was subtle but it looked deliberate to Jack, and turned back to the blue police box. "They're okay! They're back!"

Ianto followed her out into the HQ. "I see you've made a real dent in the cleaning," he said dryly.

"We're glad you're alive too," Gwen said cheerfully.

As they all filtered back into the headquarters Gwen started and Owen and Tosh both began backing away from Suzy. Jack sighed. "Everyone calm down and someone get me some coffee."

"You … you brought Suzy back …" Gwen stammered, her eyes wide. Jack decided to avoid checking what Suzy's expression was like.

"We had to," Ianto said, "you guys were missing and we needed help – you _know_ she's always been good with alien tech – "

"Yeah, she's also _nuts_," Owen protested.

"I _am_ still here," Suzy said dryly.

"More's the pity," Owen muttered, drier still.

"_Look_," Martha intervened, "we couldn't have sorted any of this out without her, so can we please stop the in-fighting for a minute? There's … still a few unanswered questions."

"Such as?" Tosh didn't sound much like she wanted to draw attention to herself at all, but like she was willing to make the sacrifice to stop the bad vibes.

"Who sent Jack's records here – " Martha began, but Jack cut her off.

"Oh, I figure that one out," he said airily, "it was me."

"Right," Owen said doubtfully. "So, how come _we_ were hypnotised or brainwashed or whatever, and you guys – Martha and Ianto – weren't? Do Joneses have some sort of immunity to mind control?"

"Perhaps," the Doctor said, "to be honest with you, when Three-in-One – "

"What?"

"Shush, I'm explaining. When Three-in-One existed in _this_ dimension, properly, its powers were spotty at best, often didn't work at all, only affected members of the same species, so – recognisably _Homo sapiens_ \- "

Ianto frowned. "I'm _Welsh_, not an alien."

" – and not all of them, either. There was a theory that it was genetic, like the way some people can roll their tongues," the Doctor demonstrated helpfully, "and some people can't." He shrugged. "No one ever found out what the deciding gene was. _Although_ I find it interesting that Suzy Costello here stopped being affected by it after it had killed her – "

"Who _is_ this man?" Gwen asked, but no one was listening.

"Dying broke the link with Jack temporarily," Suzy said, "and Jack was acting as a conduit or host for the Master previously, wasn't he? We weren't being controlled by Three-in-One, we were under the thumb of the source –

"You have no idea how disturbing it is to be in any kind of 'we' with you," Jack muttered.

"Likewise," Suzy said coolly.

Owen rolled his eyes. "Right. You just _had_ to have a better class of brainwashing than everyone else."

"What's this about you sending your own records, though?" the Doctor asked, sticking his hands in his pockets. "Doesn't that create an paradox? _Jack_, what have I told you – "

"No," Martha said, hastily, "surely it _prevents_ one?"

"Why would Jack go and make himself send the records here?" the Doctor mused.

"Excuse me," Owen hazarded, "what the hell are we talking about?"

"I don't know, perhaps I had to find something while sending the records and sending them is a sort of message to me to come and send them?" Jack hesistated.

"From a future version of yourself or the past?" the Doctor asked, sounding mildly intrigued rather than wildly curious.

"Only one way to find out – I'll have to go and find my pre-wipe self and send him to go – "

"This might be a stupid question," said Tosh slowly – she had apparently been following the conversation a little more closely than Owen, "but why can't Jack just … _remember_ the message? If there is one?"

"I had my memories wiped by the Time Agency," Jack said briskly, without looking at her. He gave the Doctor an impatient but ingratiating smile.

"Time Agency?" Gwen began.

"Action now, explanations later!" the Doctor said.

"You're good at that," Martha sighed. The Doctor ignored her.

"Jack! In the TARIDS, please."

"Whoa whoa wait wait," said Owen, "_What_ is going on here?"

"Jack," the Doctor said, pointing, just in case Owen was somehow unfamiliar with his own boss, "is going to go to the 51st century – about 5098, wasn't it? – and instruct his self of the time to travel forwards in his _own_ timeline and send on the records that were received here while you were being mind-controlled, safe in the knowledge that the earlier version of himself has the memories of all the access codes which have been wiped from current-Jack's mind, _and_ won't remember participating in a space-time disrupting anomaly that shouldn't have been allowed to happen. All clear?" He beamed.

"I think I'm going to have a nosebleed," Owen said in a faint voice.

"Jack's pissing about with the timeline," Ianto translated. "Again."

"Come on," the Doctor said, shoving Jack impatiently in the small of the back. Jack grinned entirely too widely. "Let's get your dreadfully unethical messing about over with so that I can get on with _mine_."

"One minute – " Martha caught Jack just as he tripped towards the TARDIS door. "Doctor, you _are_ going to bring him back to the right time this time, aren't you?"

"What? Of course! More or less."

"The exact moment he left," Martha persisted with a deep frown.

"Yes!"

"I'm _timing_ you," she said. "If it takes you longer than it takes me to explain things to the others you're in trouble." She released Jack's arm.

* * *

The enforcement and field operations arm of the Time Agency was lit entirely by artificial sunlight operating on an adjustable diurnal cycle. There were no windows, because it was fourteen feet underground with walls and ceiling designed to withstand the worst the universe in general – or at least the sentient parts of it – could throw at the building. The work they did was not popular.

Often it was a bustling hive of activity, but as Jack strode away from the TARDIS doors the corridors were deserted. _Founder's Day,_ Jack thought, and, _why would I have been working?_ He headed on down the corridor, which had been set to "dusk", possibly for some sort of effect. If his younger self was alone in the building and working that was probably the case; what Jack remembered of his time at the Agency certainly led him to believe that he was a melodramatic sod when he wanted to be.

Under normal time travel guidelines (he was loath to think of them as "rules"), meeting up with one's former self was strongly discouraged, unless it was a meeting one had a clear and full memory of and needed to keep in order to _prevent_ a potentially dangerous paradox from forming. Jack, like many of his cohorts, had spent a lot of time in his training period flouting this particular rule for the purpose of narcissistic sexual adventures and cheating at exams, and the frisson of strangeness that most felt in the presence of themselves had long been subsumed in him.

So when he entered the darkened office and saw the back of his own head bent low over a computer array the size of a car (the sheer amount of information the place needed to process to pinpoint them in time and to programme the Vortex Manipulators meant that computers really did have to be huge) he felt little but profound relief.

The brown-haired head popped up at his approach and Jack felt his chest contract a little, because all the mirrors and films in the universe never really compared to actually interacting with himself and he really, really _was_ a charming and handsome bastard.

"_Again_?" Jack's younger self asked, staring at Jack with more impatience than confusion.

"I need a fav – what do you - _I_ \- mean, _again_?" Jack sat down on a desk and leapt up again as his buttocks registered, even if his mind did not, that it was covered in hundreds of tiny little diamonds.

"Less than half an hour ago on my timeline," said Younger Jack, every Jack with an expression that he recognised as covetous and slightly turned-on, "I was here again. Older, mind. I said _much_ older but honestly didn't look beyond forty. Apparently I age well." This last sentence was uttered with such a lascivious smile and eyebrow-jerk that Jack found himself charmed in spite of himself, _by_ himself.

"Did I say why I was here?"

"Mm hmm. I said I had to pass on a message to my younger self – I thought I meant me, but the message didn't make any sense so perhaps I meant – well, _this_ me." Younger Jack gave Jack a curious look. "What _I_ want to know is why I wouldn't remember being told it anyway, my memory's not that bad – "

Jack frowned. "Can you use second person pronouns for a bit, please? I think my ears are going to start bleeding."

"Ah," Younger Jack said, sounding disappointed and a little scathing, "so I get _slow_ as I age."

"And less annoying," Jack muttered. He tried to sit down again, but the diamond-covered desk was still incredibly uncomfortable. "What was this message?"

"What was I saying about a favour? And why can't – alright, _you_ \- remember what it was?" Younger Jack looked briefly defiant, and Jack struggled with the unique sensation of wanting to both smack himself in the mouth and kiss himself on it. He wondered if this was how other people felt around him _now_, and how they survived it if it was.

"Use our – your – my – the brain in that head," Jack said wearily and with some grammatical confusion. "Tomorrow morning I get mind-wiped. Two years of memories and a load of other stuff disappears out of my head forever." He didn't think to add, _I don't even know the name my mother gave me anymore_.

"That explains that," Younger Jack agreed. He looked put out. "What's this about a favour?"

"I need – or I think I need – you – that is, me at this point in my timeline – to travel to _this_ date – " Jack handed his younger self a piece of paper with the Doctor's almost illegible handwriting on it, "- and send all the files to me at the Torchwood H.Q. – that's there, underneath – at _this_ point – " he tapped the second date, "- to prevent a paradox from forming."

Younger Jack raised his eyebrows. "And the reason a later incarnation of me can't do this?" he folded his arms, the paper crinkling against his bicep (_why am I so good-looking_ Jack thought helplessly), "I'm not saying I won't do it. I can't really refuse a favour to myself. I just … think this is a convoluted way of going about it. How do I _know_ it's me from now who sends – sent – those files?"

"Because I've had the protocols wiped from my mind," Jack explained patiently, trying a third time to lean nonchalantly on the desk and succeeding only in hurting his palms this time, "but the files came through as they should have done."

"So …" Younger Jack looked annoyed and sighed over the scrap of paper. "I see."

"Complicated," Jack admitted, "but – "

"Not _really_. If I – you – remembered working here I'd - _you'd_ \- know that this is pretty simple as time-stitching goes," Younger Jack said quite scornfully. "For instance – "

"I remember quite a lot of it," Jack pointed out, "but not a few of the things I need to know for this. Oh, and they've cancelled my account, so I – you – use Ceno's."

"They've cancelled mine and not Ceno's? But Ceno's been dead for … so long …" Younger Jack looked startled. "They must be really – " he caught himself. "The message."

"Yes?"

"From me, a _long_ time in the future. I said 'countless years', but that can't be right. A very, very long time in my future," Younger Jack looked meditative. "Which was hope-inspiring as until then I was _sure_ I was going to be executed for defection – by comparison a mind-wipe's not so – "

"Defection to who?" Jack asked quickly, seizing his chance.

"Do I want this message or not?"

"_Pronouns_," Jack said desperately.

"Fuck you."

"That's better," Jack brushed his fair from his forehead to little avail. "And yes, I guess I'd better have it, if future-me remembers getting it from me now."

"The message is: _I know the location of the Artefacts of Rassilon, and they are safe_," said Younger Jack. He watched Jack with an intent expression. "Does that mean anything?"

"Barely," Jack said with a frown. "Nothing else?"

"There was a _lot_ of stuff to convince me that I was talking to me and not someone … you know, and some stuff about when I had to give the message and why it had to be given," Younger Jack said dismissively, and he reached under the desk. "And – he gave me this to give to you."

"Pronouns at _last_," Jack said happily. His younger self sighed and handed him a small, sage-green book. It had a deep scratch in the front cover, which seemed like perfectly ordinary leather, and looked incredibly old. Jack peered at the spine, in which faint gold letters could just be made out.

"_The Worshipful and Ancient Law of … Gaillfrey_?"

"Apparently I'm going to need it," Younger Jack said, with a small smile. "I suppose I'd better go and save myself from creating a paradox." He stood. "Did I - _you_ \- want to know – "

"_JACK!_" shouted the Doctor from several corridors away. His voice carried very well, and he sounded annoyed rather than particularly urgent.

"_Jack_?" Younger Jack echoed. "What kind of name is that for – "

"The one I ended up with," Jack said impatiently.

"Oh, one last thing," Younger Jack insisted, making a _stop_ motion at Jack's wrist. Jack froze on the spot.

"Yes?"

Young Jack's square firm hands seized the back of Jack's neck and pressed their mouths together – a perfect fit – their bodies interlocking like the teeth of cogs. Jack grabbed his younger self by the chin and kissed back hard as he felt his knees – both pairs – begin to buckle.

"_Fuck_," Younger Jack breathed as they stopped, "I'm _good_."

"I was about to say the same thing," Jack muttered, bumping his forehead against his younger self's with a kind of affectionate intimacy he'd never really used on anyone else. "I _missed_ that."

"_JACK!_" the Doctor yelled, sounding a little more impatient now.

He gave his younger self's shoulder one last friendly squeeze, and bounded away, book in hand.

"What? What's happened now?" Jack leapt into the TARDIS and closed the door.

"He's escaped," the Doctor said grimly. He didn't need to say who.

"Escaped? I thought – "

"You know how I said not to try and take off the Vortex Manipulator because I knew my old nemesis and he'd have booby-trapped it because he's painfully predictable at times?" the Doctor said, pulling a lever. He did not look Jack in the eye, and he sounded almost guilty. "Well, it turns out that the booby-trap was to catapult him randomly through space and time."

"… you tried to that it off?"

"Well I couldn't leave it on him!" The Doctor rubbed his neck. "He was at least still unconscious. But he could be _anywhere_ now."

"Including the heart of a sun," Jack pointed out brightly.

"Jack, that's the only other surviving member of my entire race you're talking about there," the Doctor yanked another lever.

"Why are you so keen to have him alive?" Jack complained. "Are you planning to _breed_ from him or something? Because I've been pregnant and let me tell you – "

"Jack." The Doctor stopped pulling levers and leaned on the nearest console as the TARDIS dematerialised.

"Yes?"

"Mind your own business for once, would you?"

* * *

It was odd, Jack thought as he bounded out of the blue wooden box, to be reassured that Torchwood was in the same state of disarray that he'd left it in. Everyone was still standing around, although Gwen had brushed her hair, Owen had apparently had the nosebleed he was threatening – or at least, he was holding a bloody tissue to his face – and everyone had a steaming mug in their hand. As far as Jack could tell this meant that they'd arrived about ten or twenty minutes after they'd left – maybe less, although he didn't think Ianto would resort to using _instant coffee_ under even the most dire of circumstances.

"Hi, gang," Jack said, by way of a hello. "Everything has gone – how does Owen usually put it? - _tits up_. And for once it's not my fault! Is there any coffee?"

"Jack," the Doctor called from the doorway of the TARDIS, "there really isn't time for coffee. We have work to do."  
Jack looked like a man torn apart by two equal and opposite desires. "I should stay," he began.

"But you don't want to, and that means you won't, Jack. You may as well come. Martha?" the Doctor peered at her. "Coming?"

Martha shook her head. "I'm staying here. Someone needs to take care of the place." She sighed and looked away. "And I don't have … I don't have Jack's resilience for … disappoints."

"What's disappointing about travelling in space and time?"

"No, Doctor."

Suzy looked as though she might explode at any moment. "I'll come."

There was a momentary silence while the Doctor looked extremely nervous, and Martha said, "No. We need you here."

Suzy shot a venomous look at Gwen. It was the kind of venomous that leads to people in different cities complaining of stomach cramps, and Gwen looked very much like she'd rather have been on a different continent. "No you don't," Suzy said sourly.

Martha gritted her teeth. "We need you here. _I_ need you here."

"We'll be back," Jack assured her. To his considerable surprise, Suzy smirked at him, reached for Martha's hand, and clutched it in hers.

"Don't hurry," she said.

"This is no good," the Doctor frowned. "I'm in a hurry. And I _need_ someone to keep you under control – " he glared at Jack.

"Ianto makes terrific coffee," Jack suggested. He couldn't resist jiggling his eyebrows just a little.

"And tea?"

Ianto's face was poker-still. "My tea is mediocre."

"Ignore him. His tea is terrific. And he knows how to use a stopwatch." Jack grinned like a shark in a toddler's swimming pool.

"I also know how to operate the TARDIS," Ianto said under his breath.

"Most importantly," the Doctor said, beckoning Ianto into the blue police box, "he knows how to keep _you_ quiet, Jack. That's a valuable skill. What did you say your name was again, master tea-maker?"

AND THUS BEGAN IANTO, JACK, AND THE DOCTOR'S ADVENTURES HUNTING A ROGUE TIMELORD THROUGHOUT THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM AND SEEKING OUT THE LOST ARTEFACTS OF RASSILON. THE END.


End file.
